An Architecture for Behavioral Organization using Dynamical Systems

To increase the capacity of an autonomous mobile robot to act in initially unknown and dynamic environments we developed an architecture for behavioral organization and action selection which is based on continuous dynamical systems. The robot's overall behavior is generated by modules, each of them deening a set of actions or simple behaviors. A system of continuous diierential equations activates a subset of these simple behaviors depending on an abstract sensor context, a working memory, logical presuppositions and mutual exclusions of actions. Nonlinear phase transitions in the solution of the underlying dynamical system result in activating or suspending the according behaviors. Mutual exclusions and logical presuppositions are coded in matrices of parameters while the symbolic sensor context is continuously calculated from the stream of sensor data. We present the dynamical system for behavioral organization and its embedding into a software architecture to control an autonomous mobile robot.