Planning and Acting with an Integrated Sense of Space

Abstract

The paper describes PECAS, an architecture for intelligent systems, and its application in the Explorer, an interactive mobile robot. PECAS is a new architectural combination of information fusion and continual planning. PECAS plans, integrates and monitors the asynchronous flow of information between multiple concurrent systems. Information fusion provides a suitable intermediary to robustly couple the various reactive and deliberative forms of processing used concurrently in the Explorer. The Explorer instantiates PECAS around a hybrid spatial model combining SLAM, visual search, and conceptual inference. This paper describes the elements of this model, and demonstrates on an implemented scenario how PECAS provides means for flexible control. 1