Mobile Robot Architecture with Parallelism between and within Layers.

Abstract

This paper describes a mobile robot architecture, called the CMU architecture, the goal of which is to enable driving of robot vehicles in a nonuniform outdoor environment. For this goal, the CMU architecture distributes processing modules among multiple computers and executes them in parallel. In order to realize multiple driving modes, the CMU architecture accomodates high-level route navigation in addition to a local control. Then it decomposes the system into several layers which work in parallel and are governed by command-report interactions. Based on the data flow within the layers, the layers are decomposed into several modules which work in parallel. Because of the parallelism both among and within the layers, CMU architecture provides enough computation power for outdoor navigation. The CMU architecture was verified with experimental runs.