Management of Sensori-Motor Activity in Mobile Robots

A mobile robot system will typically have associated with it a number of sensing subsystems. If these sensing subsystems are \active", that is, using motion to aid in the sensing process 1, 2, 8, 9, 14], they will each be issuing motor requests related to the sensory processing algorithm that they are performing. In addition, the manipulatory portions of the robot system (i.e. those which uses its arms, grippers and so on, to manipulate objects) will also be requesting motions. Thus an important consideration in the design of sensori-motor systems in robotics is the management of connicting motion requests from multiple sensory and manipulatory modules. This paper examines the motion management problem and we present in this paper an architecture, based on Bestavros' IOTA abstraction 5], that allows one to schedule the motor commands sent to the various actuators in the robot in a manner appropriate to the goals of the robot.