Supervised Hybrid Control Architecture for Navigation of a Personal Robot

As personal robots coexist with a person with a role to help a person, while adapting various human life and environment, the personal robots have to accommodate frequently-changing or different-from-home-to-home environment. In addition, personal robots may have many kinds of different Kinematic configurations depending on the capabilities. Some may have a mobile base and others may have arms and a head. The motivation of this study arises from this not-well-defined home environment and varying Kinematic configuration. So the goal of this study is to develop a general control architecture for personal robots. There exist three major architectures; deliberative, reactive and hybrid. We found that these are applicable only for the defined environment with a fixed Kinematic configuration. Neither could accommodate the above two requirements. For the general solution, we propose a Supervised Hybrid Architecture (SHA), in which we use double layers of deliberative and reactive controls, distributed control with a modular design of Kinematic configurations, and real-time Linux OS. Deliberative and reactive actions interact through a corresponding arbitrator. These arbitrators help a robot to choose an appropriate architecture depending on the current situation to successfully perform a given task. The distributed control modules communicate through IEEE 1394 for the easy expandability. With a personal robot platform with a mobile base, two arms, a head and a pan-tilt stereo eye system, we tested the developed SHA for static as well as dynamic environments. For this application, we developed decision-making rules for selecting appropriate control methods for several situations of navigation task. Examples are shown to show the effectiveness.