<title>Self-awareness in mobile robots</title>

摘要

Self-awareness is the ability for a mobile robot to, on its own, detect and deal with operational abnormalities. Such an ability is needed for the robot to operate robustly in an unpredictable environment. For the robot to be self-aware it must be capable of sensing its own internal state (such as detecting hardware failures or a drop in battery charge level), reacting quickly to such internal inputs, and infer the implications of the resulting actions. At the lowest level, the ability to detect hardware failures enables a reactive robot to substitute functionally equivalent behaviors for those that no longer work because of the failures. If the failures are serious, the robot should be able to abort the current and initiate a new task/mission to correct the problem. At the highest level, self-awareness would give the robot a sense of its `well-being,' limitations, capabilities, and needs. This paper describes how the self-awareness ability is being implemented on a mobile robot, called SmartyCat, that uses high level reasoning to coordinate and specialize its low level reactive behaviors to the mission goal. The multilevel mechanisms, ranging from behavior substitution to mission replanning, needed for self- awareness are discussed.