A behavior-based arm controller

The author presents a working, implemented controller for an actual mobile robot arm. The goal of the system is to locate and retrieve empty soda cans in an unstructured environment using a variety of local sensors. The controller, however, is not a centralized sequential program, but rather a collection of 15 independent behaviors. Each of these behaviors contains some grain of expertise concerning the collection task and cooperates with the others to accomplish its goal. These behaviors run concurrently, in real time, on a set of eight loosely coupled on-board 8-bit microprocessors. The author describes the methodology used to decompose the collection task and discusses the types of implicit spatial representation and reasoning used by the system.<>