A Distributed Control Architecture for Autonomous Robot Systems

The main advantage of distributed controlled robots and subsystems is the decentralized task execution by the system components. This way, properties for the design of flexible control architectures like modularity, fault-tolerance, integrability and extendibility are easily obtained, further it is possible to use the concepts of distributed knowledge and decentralized world representation. On the other hand, coordination between the components, for example path planning for collision avoidance between both manipulators in a two-arm-system, is very difficult to guarantee. To explain these concepts, the Karlsruhe Autonomous Mobile Robot KAMRO is considered which is being developed at IPR. The robot system consists of several subcomponents like two manipulators, hand-eyecameras, one overhead-camera and a mobile platform. Extensions to the distributed control architecture KAMARA (KAMROs Multi Agent Robot Architecture) are described that are responsible to overcome coordination problems, for example caused by the independent task execution of both manipulator systems. Further, it is explained which way the decentralized world representation can be used for parallel task execution. The described intelligent control architecture will replace the former control architecture of the autonomous robot KAMRO.