Sfx: An Architecture For Action-oriented Sensor Fusion

Abstract

Sensor fusion has an important role in the navigation of autonomous mobile robots. Our research has generated a generic and robust pro- cess model based on the action-oriented percep- tion paradigm. The autonomous execution and ex- ception handling abilities of this model have been implemented as the Sensor Fusion Effects (SFX) architecture. The key aspects of this implemen- tation are the sensing plan, the uncertainty man- agement mechanism, the application of feedback from the sensing process to individual sensors, the detection of exceptions to the sensing plan, and handling of those exceptions. This paper gives an overview of the SFX architecture, concentrating on the sensing plan as the central control struc- ture guiding autonomous execution. This paper also reports on experiments using sensor data col- lected from our mobile robot which demonstrate the use of the sensing plan representation, the ex- ecution sequence, the application of feedback, and how feedback improves the overall sensing capa- bilities of the robot.