HNG: A Robust Architecture for Mobile Robots Systems

Summary

Researchers in robotics agree that control architectures must be reactive, modular, standardized, reliable, and should allow the use of multiple functions. In the last few years, the open challenges organized by the DARPA have shown that robustness can be obtained and that real autonomous systems can be built. We conducted an analysis of several control architectures, and especially of those who had good performances in terms of reliability. The purpose of this analysis was to select the best mechanisms in the available architectures and to build an architecture that would allow us to proceed to benchmarking and prototyping for perception, planning and control algorithms on real systems in difficult environments. As a result, the Hybrid and Network-based Generic architecture HNG uses multiple processes, publish/subscribe communication mechanisms, and its control is based on contract net mechanisms. Our preliminary tests show the potential of this approach.