A system architecture for a mobile robot based on activities and a blackboard control unit

The design and implementation of a system architecture for control of a mobile robot is presented based on the notion of activities that are supervised by a blackboard system. An activity is defined as an organizational unit which exhibits a basic skill. Six behavior and five design requirements are defined and are used in evaluating the performance of the system architecture. It is the author's contention that if a mobile robot is to function autonomously in an unknown environment, it must meet these requirements. Using these requirements the activity-based architecture presented can be compared to other existing systems. Actual implementations of two activities (a passageway and channel activity) are used to validate the performance of this architecture.<<ETX>>

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