A distributed evolvable control architecture for mobile robots

The organization of a robot system, or its control structure, determines its capacities to achieve tasks and to react to events. The authors present such a structure that stresses two aspects they believe are essential: reactivity and goal-driven context-guided control. In order to be easily extensible, this control structure is based on a classification of robot processing functions in four basic types and the formal definition of the notion of module, an entity that embeds several functions; relationships and exchanges between modules are defined so as to comply with an evolutive principle.<>