Intelligent Machine Architecture 1.0 Introduction & System Overview

Humanoid and mobile robots are just a few examples of intelligent machines that require sophisticated software to transform sensory information into purposeful actions. When writing this type of large-scale, complex software, developers benefit from domainspecific guidelines that promote code reuse and integration. The Intelligent Machine Architecture (IMA) was designed to provide these guidelines and is currently used to control the ISAC [Peters et al., 2000], Helpmate [Kawamura et al., 2000], and Scooter [Wilkes et al., 2002] robots at the Vanderbilt University Intelligent Robotics Laboratory. IMA was also developed to address software integration and scalability issues in intelligent machines [Bagchi et al., 1992]. Software integration is the process of combining software to extend the functionality of the system. Software scalability is a measure of how well a particular piece of software allows for future integration [Schach, 2002].