Decision making in a robotic architecture for autonomy

This paper presents an overview of the intelligent decision-making capabilities of the CLARAty robotic architecture for autonomy. CLARAty is a two layered architecture where the top Decision Layer contains techniques for autonomously creating a plan of robot commands and the bottom Functional Layer provides standard robot capabilities that interface to system hardware. This paper focuses on the Decision Layer organization and capabilities. Specifically, the Decision Layer provides a framework for utilizing AI planning and executive techniques, which provide onboard, autonomous command generation and replanning for planetary rovers. The Decision Layer also provides a flexible interface to the Functional Layer, which can be tailored based on user preferences and domain features. This architecture is currently being tested on several JPL rovers.

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