A Behavior-Based Arm Controller

We present a working, implemented controller for an actul mobile robot arm. The goal of the system is to locate and retrieve empty soda cans in an unstructured environment using a variety of local sensors. Our controller, however, is not a centralized sequential program, but rather a collection of 15 independent behaviors. Each of these behaviors contains some grain of expertise concerning the collection task and cooperates with the others to accomplish its goal. These behaviors run concurrently, in real time, on a set of eight loosely coupled on-board 8-bit microprocessors. In this paper we describe the methodology used to decompose the collection task and discuss the types of implicit spatial representation and reasoning used by the system. © 1989 IEEE