Coordination of actions in an autonomous robotic system

Abstract

Robots are autonomous agents whose actions are performed in the real world during a period of time. There are a number of general constraints on such actions, for example that the same action can not have two separate instances during overlapping time intervals, or restrictions that are due to which state variables affect the action or are affected by it. Each process in the robot's cognitive system that is to request the initiation of an action must respect those restrictions. In this article we describe the design and formal characterization of a separate process, called an action coordinator, that manages these restrictions. © 2006 Springer-Verlag Berlin/Heidelberg.