The Remote Agent Executive: Capabilities to Support Integrated Robotic Agents

Abstract

The Remote Agent (RA) integrates a broad spectrum of robotic activities, including planning, scheduling, execution, monitoring, failure detection, diagnosis, and recovery. The RA Executive (EXEC) can be viewed as the core of the agent. EXEC enables software developers to think about the robot at a higher level; it also supports the reuse of knowledge and code across multiple robot applications. EXEC's capabilities include a high-level procedural action-definition language, services for resource management and configuration management, support for executing flexible closed-loop plans and command sequences, support for replanning, and a framework for specifying fault responses including safe modes and responses to plan failures. We believe that these capabilities are required for most autonomous agents, and that executives and execution capabilities will become more essential as we attempt to develop autonomous agents of increasing capability. Moreover, we deem modular...