Modular agents for robot navigation

Building an expandable control strategy for a mobile robot system that is capable of performing a given task or tasks is an important issue. For instance, new hardware and peripherals keep emerging as better and faster technologies become available. In this paper, we describe a system that is designed for controlling a mobile robot system with multiple sensors or peripherals. We propose a control scheme that employs at least as many server modules as there are hardware or peripheral components. Thus, a server is dedicated to controlling one hardware component and responds to all requests designated to it. Since hardware components are independent of each other, the server modules can run concurrently and new peripherals can be easily added without modifying the existing system. A typical configuration of a system consists of several task specific modules, each carrying a subgoal as part of a common goal that the robot has to achieve. Information sharing among these modules is accomplished via communication with a central data server. All modules can send query or update requests of the information used by the entire system. The control system is designed to enable all the modules to run concurrently on different machines. Preliminary results on an indoor navigation task are encouraging.