The NIST Mobility Testbed

This paper describes the application of NIST´s real-time control system (RCS) reference architecture for intelligent systems to autonomous robotics. The focus is on the Mobility Testbed, a facility which supports interdependent research in two areas: 1) refinement of the RCS reference architecture and development of its methodology (the steps and tools used to derive specific implementations from the reference architecture), and 2) experiments to develop advanced vision and world modeling techniques for autonomous robots. NIST researchers gain several benefits by using Testbed resources and the consistent approach to control architecture provided by the reference architecture. Developers outside of NIST can also gain these benefits by using a reference architecture and a corresponding methodology for system development