Structured Reactive Controllers

Service robots, such as autonomous office couriers or robot tourguides, must be both reliable and efficient. This requires them to flexibly interleave their tasks, exploit opportunities, quickly plan their course of action, and, if necessary, revise their intended activities. In this paper, we show how structured reactive controllers (SRCs) satisfy these requirements. The novel feature of SRCs is that they employ and reason about plans that specify and synchronize concurrent percept-driven behavior. Powerful control abstractions enable SRCs to integrate physical action, perception, planning, and communication in a uniform framework and to apply fast but imperfect computational methods without sacrificing reliability and flexibility. Concurrent plans are represented in a transparent and modular form so that automatic planning processes can reason about the plans and revise them. We present experiments in which SRCs are used to control two autonomous mobile robots. In one of them an SRC controlled the course of action of a museum tourguide robot that has operated for thirteen days, more than ninetyfour hours, completed 620 tours, and presented 2668 exhibits.