System Integration Supporting Evolutionary Development and Design

With robotic systems entering our daily life, they have to become more flexible and subsuming a multitude of abilities in one single integrated system. Subsequently an increased extensibility of the robots' system architectures is needed. The goal is to facilitate a long-time evolution of the integrated system in-line with the scientific progress on the algorithmic level. In this paper we present an approach developed for an event-driven robot architecture, focussing on the coordination and interplay of new abilities and components. Appropriate timing, sequencing strategies, execution guaranties, and process flow synchronization are taken into account to allow appropriate arbitration and interaction between components as well as between the integrated system and the user. The presented approach features dynamic reconfiguration and global coordination based on simple production rules. These are applied first time in conjunction with flexible representations in global memory spaces and an event-driven architecture. As a result a highly adaptive robot control compared to alternative approaches is achieved, allowing system modification during runtime even within complex interactive human-robot scenarios.