A Patterns-Oriented Framework for the Development of Automatic and Deliberative skills for mobile robots

This paper presents a patterns-oriented framework designed for the development of automatic and deliberative skills. It is based on the concept of distributed active objects, which are autonomous execution entities with their own threads of control, and can interact with others using event notification. In this architecture, each skill is viewed as an integration of a set of reusable software components. The skills have a hierarchical organization; the basic skills are found in the lower level, whereas the most complex skills (automatic and deliberative) are found in the higher level. Each skill is developed using lower levels skills as components, which are specified in the sequencing plans by definition in a specification language. Skills execution is based on a finite State Machine. A set of motors and sensorimotor skills are defined in each node. To integrate all the heterogeneous software components, the stub/skeleton distributed programming paradigm is used .