Konolige, Kurt and Myers, Karen and Ruspini, Enrique and Saffiotti, Alessandro. The Saphira Architecture: A Design for Autonomy. Journal of Experimental and Theoretical AI, Special Issue on Software Architectures for Autonomous Agents, vol. 9, 1997.
Abstract
Mobile robots, if they are to perform useful tasks and become accepted in open environments, must be fully autonomous. Autonomy has many different aspects; here we concentrate on three central ones: the ability to attend to another agent, to take advice about the environment, and to carry out assigned tasks. All three involve complex sensing and planning operations on the part of the robot, including the use of visual tracking of humans, coordination of motor controls, and planning. We show how these capabilities are integrated in the Saphira architecture, using the concepts of coordination of behavior, coherence of modeling, and communication with other agents. This paper reports work done while this author was at SRI International