A Task Management Architecture for Control of Intelligent Robots

Designing and building Intelligent robots involves integration of various functionalities such as manipulation, navigation, various recognitions, speech understanding and expression, reasoning, planning, and so on. Furthermore, such functional components are often distributed over several processors even in a single robotic system. Manifold functionalities and inherent complexity of robotic systems require a well-organized uniform control of the functional components so that the formidable integration of the functionalities becomes manageable. In this paper, we present an agent-based task management architecture for control of intelligent robots to simplify the integration task. The task manager works as an integration middleware and provides a consistent and unified control view for the functional components which may be distributed over a network.