“Talk to me!”: enabling communication between robotic architectures and their implementing infrastructures

Abstract

Complex, autonomous robots integrate a large set of sometimes very diverse algorithms across at least three levels of system organization: the agent architecture, the implementation environment, and the hardware devices. Insofar as a distinction is maintained between them, the levels serve different purposes and thus exhibit different characteristic strengths and weaknesses. Exchanging information among organizational levels can be used to mitigate the shortcomings of one level by making use of the strengths of another. In this paper, we highlight the roles, characteristics, and relations between the infrastructure and the architecture of complex robots, describing a novel form of integration that results from enabling the exchange of information between these two levels, which otherwise is maintained internally. The information from the infrastructure is especially amenable for use by the architecture to achieve a higher level of robustness and system awareness. We demonstrate the functionality and utility of the proposed mechanisms in a set of experiments in which failures of architectural components are induced on an actual robot engaged in a joint human-robot team task.