Autonomous mobile manipulators managing perception and failures
Alberto Finzi, Fiora Pirri, Marco Pirrone, Massimo Romanò, Milko Vaccaro · 2001
We present a control system for autonomous mobile manipulators based on a theory of actions integrated with a theory of perception and failures. The system applies to autonomous manipulators built for simple missions like building towers of blocks, collecting balls of paper and putting them into a bin, or clearing obstacles from a path. For these application domains we have built three autonomous agents: ArmHand0, ArmHandONE and A.R.R.I.G.O. The core of the system is a high level program controlling the on-line agent behaviour: while a goal is not achieved, it selects a task from a library of possible subplans and executes it. The task, when correctly chosen, must lead to a subgoal position. At the end of each task execution, visual perception is used to monitor the coherence between the configuration of the domain and the configuration entailed as a consequence of the execution of the task. In case of a misalignment between the predicted state and the perceived one, a diagnostic procedure is activated.