Management of sensory-motor activity in mobile robots

Consideration is given to the management of conflicting demands on the use of the motor units of the robot from the active sensors and manipulatory processes. An operating-system-like facility is introduced for managing the conflicting motor requests produced by multiple active sensing and manipulation tasks. A proposed implementation of this sensory-motor management facility based on the input-output-timed-automata (IOTA) abstraction is introduced. The IOTA abstraction is general enough to allow the enforcement of temporal constraints and to permit the specification and modification of task priorities based on the goals and current state of the robot. The IOTA-based sensory-motor operating system acts as a scheduler for various motor requests submitted by the active sensor and manipulation systems. The sensory-motor system is more general than the subsumption architecture of R. Brooks (1986) and can implement in a straightforward fashion alteration of priorities