A parallel blackboard system for robot control

Abstract

The blackboard architecture is a powerful expert systems architecture. Its main advantages are flexibility of control and integration of different kinds of knowledge representations and inferencing techniques. At our Laboratories we built a blackboard shell, based on the principles as developed in the system Hearsay-II and the blackboard shells Hearsay-III and BB1. This paper describes how we modify this blackboard shell, in order to use it for the control of a robot cell. This cell consists of a number of independent devices, which will have to execute their tasks concurrently. This means a modification of the blackboard shell towards parallelism. Ve see great possibilities for using our system not only for simulating robot cell configurations and proto typing flexible control of robot cells, but also for other systems with multiple processors.