We present an architecture for controlling autonomous mobile robots based on control of continuous activities (processes) rather than discrete actions. We define a hierarchy of activity, and argue that different levels of activities require different sorts of computational mechanisms to control them. Many controversial issues concerning the use of persistent internal state and higher levels of abstraction can be better understood in terms of this hierarchy. Two experiments using the architecture to control mobile robots performing complex navigation tasks are described.

This paper describes an implementation of the 3 T robot architecture which has been under development for the last eight y ears. The architecture uses three levels of abstraction and description languages which a r e compatible between levels. The makeup of the architecture helps to coordinate planful activities with real-time behaviors for dealing with dynamic environments. In recent y ears, other architectures have been created with 1 similar attributes but two features distinguish the 3 T a r c hitecture: 1) a variety of useful software tools have been created to help implement this architecture on multiple real robots and 2) this architecture, or parts of it, have been implemented on a variety o f v ery di erent robot systems using di erent processors, operating systems, e ectors and sensor suites.

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Abstract-ESL (Execution Support Language)[5] is a language for encoding execution knowledge in embedded autonomous agents. It is similar in spirit to RAPs [2] and RPL [7], and RS [6], and its design owes much to these systems. Unlike its predecessors, ESL aims for a more utilitarian point in the design space. ESL was designed primarily to be a powerful and easy-to-use tool, not to serve as a representation for automated reasoning or formal analysis (although nothing precludes its use for these purposes). ESL consists of several sets of loosely coupled features that can be composed in arbitrary ways. It is currently implemented as a set of extensions to Common Lisp, and is being used to build the executive component of a control architecture for an autonomous spacecraft [8].

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