A Distributed Control System for the CMU Rover

This paper describes a distributed software control structure developed for the CMU Rover, an advanced mobile robot equipped with a variety of sensors. Expert modules are used to control the operation of the sensors and actuators, interpret sensory and feedback data, build an internal model of the robot's environment, devise strategies to accomplish proposed tasks and execute these strategies. Each expert module is composed of a master process and a slave process, where the master process controls the scheduling and working of the slave process. Communication among expert modules occurs asynchronously over a blackboard structure. Information specific to the execution of a given task is provided through a control plan. The system is distributed over a network of processors. Real-time operating system kernels local to each processor and an interprocess message communication mechanism ensure transparency of the underlying network structure. The various parts of the system are presented in this paper and future work to be performed is mentioned