Toward developing reusable software components for robotic applications

Abstract

We present an overview of the CLARAty architecture which aims at developing reusable software components for robotic systems. These components are to support autonomy software which plans and schedules robot activities. CLARAty modifies the conventional 3-level robotic architecture into a 2-layered design: the functional layer and the decision layer. The former provides a representation of the system components and an implementation of their functionalities. The latter is the decision-making engine that drives the former. It globally reasons about the goals, system resources, and system state. The functional layer is composed of a set of interrelated object-oriented hierarchies consisting of active and passive objects that represent the system abstraction levels. We present an overview of the design of the functional layer. It is decomposed into a set of reusable core components and a set of extended components that adapt the reusable set to different hardware implementations. The reusable components provide interface definitions and implementations of basic functionality, provide local executive capabilities, manage local resources, and support decision layer queries.