A supervisory system for the URMAD robotic unit

This paper reports part of the work related to the design and development of the URMAD system, a mobile robotic unit purposely devised to assist the severely disabled in a household environment. A supervisory system based on distributed decision making and functional distribution has been designed and implemented on a VME/OS9 architecture. This system is capable of executing typical domestic tasks expressed in a synthetic command language extracted from everyday vocabulary. The user´s requests can be easily specified by using a Windows-like graphical user interface and are translated into the command language by an interpreter running on a personal computer. In the paper, a general overview of the URMAD system is provided. A detailed description of the proposed modular architecture for the supervisory system, of its various modules and of the command language, is presented. Finally, the hardware and software implementation of the first prototype of the system and some preliminary experimental tests and simulations are reported