Centralized Arbitration in a Behavior-Based Architecture

An architecture is presented in which distributed decision-making processes cooperatively determine a mobile robot’s path by sending votes to a centralized arbiter. One type of arbiter defined within this DAMN architecture performs command fusion to select that action which best satisfies the combined behavior votes, allowing multiple goals and constraints to be considered simultaneously. Another type of arbiter performs action selection via utility fusion. Within the utility fusion framework, behaviors indicate the utility of various possible world states and the arbiter determines the next action based on the maximization of expected utility. Thus, DAMN performs centralized arbitration of votes from distributed behaviors and in so doing provides coherent, rational, goal-directed behavior while preserving real-time responsiveness to its immediate physical environment