Using a blackboard to integrate multiple activities and achieve strategic reasoning for mobile-robot navigation

Abstract

We have designed a mobile robot system architecture that uses a blackboard to coordinate and integrate several real time activities. An activity is an organizational unit, or module, designed to perform a specific function, such as traversing a hallway, going down steps, crossing over an open channel on the floor, or tracking a landmark. An activity resembles a behavior in that it controls the robot to perform a specific task. It differs from a behavior in that it is designed to perform the specific task in a narrow application domain, whereas a behavior generally resembles a biological response-that is, an organism's response to a stimulus. The activity based blackboard system consists of two hierarchical layers for strategic and reactive reasoning: a blackboard database to keep track of the state of the world and a set of activities to perform real time navigation.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>