Control of Mobile Robots Using the Soar Cognitive Architecture

This paper describes the development of a system that uses computational psychology (the Soar cognitive architecture) for the control of unmanned vehicles. A multithreaded software system written using Java and integrated with the Soar cognitive architecture has been implemented on two types of mobile robots. Soar can be used as a general purpose robotic intelligence system and can handle a wide variety of sensor inputs and motor-control outputs. The use of existing computational psychology methods (such as Soar) may be a more efficient approach to developing robotic software, rather than developing new software for every new unmanned vehicle application. Results from the application of this software system (named the cognitive robotic system, or CRS) to a practical unmanned ground vehicle mission, navigating to a target GPS location while avoiding obstacles, are described. The CRS has been designed so that its capabilities can be expanded in the future through the inclusion of additional sensors and motors, additional software systems, and more sophisticated Soar agents.