Design of a modular architecture for autonomous robot

This paper proposes a formalism for the description and automated implementation of the functional modules of an autonomous mobile robot in the framework of multi-layered control architectures. The formalization of the description of a module, including its behavior and its interfaces with other modules makes the implementation easier by providing higher level tools and automatic consistence checking tools in the module compiler. The execution control level can take advantage of the formal description of the activity tree of the modules to manage the resources more efficiently. A global task of the robot is achieved by the control system by connecting the modules into a dynamic activity tree. Finally the authors present a modules compiler that uses the formal module description and user supplied functions to produce the modules in an automated way