Communication Within Multi-FSM Based Robotic Systems

Abstract

The paper presents a robotic system design methodology based on the concept of an embodied agent decomposed into communicating subsystems, whose activities are specified in terms of FSMs invoking behaviours parameterised by transition functions and terminal conditions. In the implementation phase, this specification is transformed into a system composed of a whiteboard providing communication means and logically labelled FSMs (LLFSMs) defining the system behaviour. These concepts are used to generate the code of the robot controller. The inclusion of inter-subsystem communication model completes the resulting system design with respect to our previous work that did not account for this model. Thus communication plays a central role in this presentation. The design methodology is exemplified with a rudimentary table tennis ball-collecting robot. The presented methodology and the implementation tools are suitable and beneficial for application to the design of other robotic systems.

Methodology of Designing Multi-agent Robot Control Systems Utilising Hierarchical Petri Nets

“…Since embodied agents contain communicating subsystems and the communication model between those subsystems was not revealed during system specification, it was difficult to verify the correctness of the developed robotic system. The interactions between subsystems using single HFSMs, assuming sequential execution of subsystem activities, was presented in [18], [5], [19].…”

EARL—Embodied Agent-Based Robot Control Systems Modelling Language

“…A robotic system can be composed of one or more agents. The discussion whether a symbolic representation of the environment is necessary in control of intelligent robots lead to the reformulation of the concepts of embodiment and situatedness within robotics, which subsequently lead to the formulation of the concept of an embodied agent [27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35]. The classification presented in, e.g., [35] or Section 2.4, points out that structurally an embodied agent is the most complete type of an agent.…”

“…A natural way of decomposing complex systems is to partition them into hardware drivers and the task dependent part. Thus, the control system of an embodied agent is decomposed into its control subsystem, virtual effectors and receptors [32][33][34][35]. Virtual effectors transform commands obtained from the control subsystem into commands acceptable by the real (hardware) effectors.…”

Agent Structure of Multimodal User Interface to the National Cybersecurity Platform – Part 1

“…Struktura interfejsu operatora musi być dostosowana do wyżej sformułowanych wymagań. Ponieważ interfejs jest konfigurowany za pomocą standardowych urządzeń wejściowych komputera lub pobudzany do działania przez operatora wydającego komendy głosowe lub gestykulacje, a ponadto oddziałuje na operatora wyświetlając dane, można jego strukturę określić za pomocą agentów upostaciowionych [18,36], które realizują swoje zadanie zbierając dane z otoczenia za pomocą receptorów, by przekształcić je na oddziaływania na to otoczenie za pomocą efektorów. Należy jedynie adekwatnie zdefiniować receptory i efektory interfejsu.…”

“…Agent działający w fizycznym otoczeniu musi mieć fizyczną powłokę (postać), by na nie oddziaływać. W związku z tym zwykło się go zwać agentem upostaciowionym [18,36]. Agentowa struktura systemu będzie określona dalej.…”