A Novel Decentralised Software Process Approach For Realtime Navigation Of Service Robots

We present a novel decentralised architecture for navigating and controlling a service robot based on control of processes rather than control of discrete actions. In a world of synchronous, tightly coupled multilayered (n-tired), hierarchical systems for service robot applications we propose an alternate architecture that is asynchronous, loosely coupled to uncoupled, process based, and safe-fail. The modules and components that have been developed and tested for this asynchronous control architecture are discussed and reported in this paper. The software engineering concepts introduced make implementing the control systems more flexible so that they can be dynamically reconfigured with ease and can be upgraded or adapted in a flexible manner. The resulting architecture is simple, and can support a wide range of trade-offs that can be manipulated easily at run-time.