ArchitectureArchitectureThese represent the different system philosophies for creating robotic systems. Their implementations are found in many different systems. ComparisonThe two rough tables here are an attempt to break down the different implementations by two related (and conflated) metrics: abstractions provided and levels which the architecture can be broken into. This biases the table towards Three Level styled systems, but turns out to still be useful. It is a good place to start to get a flavor of the systems out there. HistoricalA look at the predecessors of "modern" robot architectures. With this arbitrary demarcation, this section covers (in a very incomplete fashion) the initial development of the Three Level architecture and Subsumption. DistributedThe targets of these systems are often sensor networks or groups of simple robots. Extreme hardware and energy constraints mean that the relevance to my research is tenuous, but still an interesting architecture to look into. GraphMany of the most recent systems have adopted a graph approach to robotic systems, at least for the high level code. This abstraction has proved powerful and has undoubtedly aided research through facilitating code sharing and reuse. Three LevelThe three levels defined within this architecture proved both reasonable and blurry enough to produce a wide range of research and implementations. Many systems today still define interfaces along these boundaries. Model BasedCertainly and exciting and interesting approach: reasoning over detailed models of the system to plan actions and diagnose problems. The architecture treats the problem as a Partially observable Markov decision process, which unfortunately precludes any robots which interact with their environment even in a modest capacity (the target of this approach was originally satellites and space probes). NSBThis section covers NSB, which seems to be a predecessor of the Subsumption architecture. Has proven fairly irrelevant to my research. (TODO: Improve this summary) |