Teleo-reactive autonomous mobile navigation

Abstract

Biological creatures apparently execute many tasks in the world by using a combination of routine skills, without doing any extensive reasoning. In recent years researchers have used this as a guide to formulate behavioral architectures for robot control. The authors have adopted the teleo-reactive (TR) formalism introduced by Nils Nilsson (1994) for their behavioral architecture. The formalism is a programming methodology for situated agents. The authors have implemented and expanded the TR formalism so that the program interpreter executes the computations in parallel. This is necessary in order for a situated agent to interact with its environment in real-time. Further extensions to the TR formalism include condition and action expressions, the flexibility of controlling how and when conditions are evaluated and the ability to control the computation frequency rate of condition processes. The authors' formalism is called TR+. A TR+ program was used to navigate a robot in the authors' lab in real-time.