Architecture for a human-robot symbiotic system

Abstract

This paper describes a human-robot symbiont that is under development at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. An overview of the symbiotic system is described that motivates the architecture that has been developed. The architecture is a hierarchical structure that consists of several expert systems which reside above a robot control interface. This interface allows the manipulator to be operated in both a teleoperated and autonomous mode. All these processes coexist with the lowest level of the hierarchy, which is a numerically intensive control algorithm. The architecture is implemented on five processors in a coarsely parallel system.