<title>CLIPS implementation of a knowledge-based distributed control of an autonomous mobile robot</title>

Abstract

We implement an architecture for the planning and control of an intelligent autonomous mobile robot which consists of concurrently running modules forming a hierarchy of control in which lower-level modules perform 'reflexive' tasks while higher-level modules perform tasks requiring greater processing of sensor data. A knowledge-based system performs the task planning and arbitration of lower-level behaviors. This system reasons about behavior selection (fusion) based on its current knowledge and the situation at hand provided by monitoring the status from lower-level behaviors and the map builder. We implement this knowledge-based planning module in CLIPS (C Language Implementation Production System), a rule-based expert systems shell. CLIPS is written in and fully integrated with the C language providing high probability and ease of integration with external systems. We discuss implementation issues including the implementation of control strategy in CLIPS rules and interfacing to other modules through the use of CLIPS user-defined external functions.