Machine-intelligent robots: a hierarchical control approach

Intelligent Machines capable of performing autonomously in uncertain environments, have imposed new design requirements for modern engineers. New concepts, drawn from areas like Artificial Intelligence, Operations Research and Control Theory, are required in order to implement anthropomorphic tasks with minimum intervention of an operator. This work deals with the definition of Hierarchically Intelligent Control and the Principle of Decreasing Precision with Increasing Intelligence. A three level structure representing Organization, Coordination and Execution will be developed as a probabilistic model of such a system and the approaches necessary to implement each one of them will be discussed. Finally, Entropy will be proposed as a common measure of all three levels and the problem of Intelligent Control will be cast as the mathematical programming solution that minimizes the total Entropy.