Abstract
Autonomous mobile robots are required to achieve multiple goals while responding quickly to the dynamic environments. An appropriate robot control architecture, which clearly and systematically defines the relationship among the inputs, the processing functions and the outputs, thus needs to be embedded in the robot controller. This paper proposes a kind of hybrid control architecture which combines the key features of the two well-known robot control architectures; hierarchical and behavioral- based. The overall control architecture consists of three layers, i.e. the highest planner, the middle plan executor, and the lowest monitor and behavior-based controller. In the planned situation, only one behavior module is chosen by the logical coordinator in the plan executor according to the way point bin. In the exceptional situation, the central controller in the plan executor issues an additional control command to reach the planned way point. Several simulations and experiments with autonomous mobile robot show that the proposed architecture enables the robot controller to achieve the multiple sequential goals even in dynamic and uncertain environments.
