Accession Number:

ADA230118

Title:

Concurrent Planning and Execution for a Walking Robot

Descriptive Note:

Technical rept.

Corporate Author:

CARNEGIE-MELLON UNIV PITTSBURGH PA ROBOTICS INST

Personal Author(s):

• Simmons, Reid

Report Date:

1990-07-01

Pagination or Media Count:

20.0

Abstract:

The Planetary Rover project is developing the Ambler, a novel legged robot, and an autonomous software system for walking the Ambler over rough terrain. As part of the project, we have developed a system that integrates perception, planning, and real-time control to navigate a single leg of the robot through complex obstacle courses. The system is integrated using the Task Control Architecture TCA, a general-purpose set of utilities for building and controlling distributed mobile robot systems. The walking system, as originally implemented, utilized a sequential sense-plan-act control cycle. This report describes efforts to improve the performance of the system by concurrently planning and executing steps. Concurrency was achieved by modifying the existing sequential system to utilize TCA features such as resource management, monitors, temporal constraints, and hierarchical task trees. Performance was increased in excess of 30 percent with only a relatively modest effort to convert and test the system. The results lend support to the utility of using TCA to develop complex mobile robot systems. author

Descriptors:

• *COMPUTER PROGRAMS
• REAL TIME
• DISTRIBUTION
• ROBOTS
• WALKING
• TERRAIN
• SEQUENCES
• TREES
• PLANNING
• MOBILE
• SELF OPERATION
• RESOURCE MANAGEMENT
• MONITORS
• ARCHITECTURE
• HIERARCHIES
• ROUGHNESS
• PERCEPTION
• CONTROL

Subject Categories:

• Computer Programming and Software
• Cybernetics
• Land and Riverine Navigation and Guidance

Distribution Statement:

APPROVED FOR PUBLIC RELEASE