Context-based design of robotic systems

Abstract

The need for improving the robustness, as well as the ability to adapt to different operational conditions, is a key requirement for a wider deployment of robots in many application domains. In this paper, we present an approach to the design of robotic systems, that is based on the explicit representation of knowledge about context. The goal of the approach is to improve the system performance, by dynamically tailoring the functionalities of the robot to the specific features of the situation at hand. While the idea of using contextual knowledge is not new, the proposed approach generalizes previous work and its advantages are discussed through a case study including several experiments. In particular, we identify many attempts to use contextual knowledge in several basic functionalities of a mobile robot such as: behaviors, navigation, exploration, localization, mapping and perception. We then show how re-designing our mobile platform with a common representation of contextual knowledge, leads to interesting improvements in many of the above mentioned components, thus achieving greater flexibility and robustness in the face of different situations. Moreover, a clear separation of contextual knowledge leads to a design methodology, which supports the design of small specialized system components instead of complex self-contained subsystems.

Intelligent Supervision for Robust Plan Execution

“…Previous works in literature have faced this problem by endowing the plan executor (e.g., a mobile robot) with some form of autonomous behavior. For instance, the control architectures discussed in [7,8,10] support the robot's autonomy by means of three layers of control: the highest one is devoted to the decisional aspects and it is typically based on one (or even more) (re)planning module(s).…”

“…The proposed methodology is therefore a way to enhance the robot's autonomy as it can flexibly switch among modalities according to its contextual conditions. This idea is not completely new, also in [8] the authors suggest a methodology for adjusting the way in which an action is carried on depending on the rover's context. For instance, their navigation has three modalities related to the rover's speed: low, medium, and high.…”

“…The second level of the architecture is the FL, which, from our point of view, is an abstraction of the rover's hardware able to match the actions issued by the Supervisor into lower level commands for the rover's actuators. In doing so, the FL may exploit services such as localization, obstacle avoidance, short range path planning, path following (see [7,8]). …”

ReCon: An Online Task ReConfiguration Approach for Robust Plan Execution

“…For instance the robotic systems described in [5] and in [21] can perform a drive action in fast or slow modes. Reliable transmission to the earth, for example, can be slow and cheap, or fast and expensive, depending on the devices actually used.…”

“…Given the rover's actions defined so far, a rover mission plan is a total ordered set of fully instantiated rover's action templates 5 . Given a particular (:action comm :parameters ( ?r -robot ?l1 -site ) :modalities (ch1,ch2) :precondition (and(in ?r ?l1) (ch1: (and (> (memoryC ?r) 0) ( >= (power ?r) (/ (memoryC ?r) (bandwith-ch1 ?r))))) (ch2:…”