A Modular, Scalable, Architecture For Unmanned Vehicles

摘要

: A modular, scalable architecture for use on unmanned vehicles has been developed at the Center for Intelligent Machines and Robotics under the direction of the Air Force Research Laboratory at Tyndall Air Force Base, FL. This state of the art architecture isolates five functionally cohesive sub-tasks into self-contained modules with well defined interfaces. The architecture consists of a Mobility Control Unit (MCU), Path Planner (PLN), Position System (POS), Detection and Mapping System (DMS), and a Primitive Driver (PD). The design considerations for the development of this architecture included sub-system modularity, implementation independent software interfaces, ability to expand system functionality through continued addition of modules (scale), and the goal of moving toward a standard architecture for autonomous systems. The focus of this paper is to present a modular architecture that addresses the above design considerations. One particularly noteworthy aspect of ...