Publication: Multi-Layered Architectures for Autonomous Systems
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2020-02
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2020-03-27
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Abstract
Deliberation is a key feature to endow advanced intelligence to autonomous agents.
Complex use cases, specially robotic applications which require a considerable degree
of autonomy, have to be coordinated by some kind of control architecture. However,
reusing existing architectures can be difficult because use cases are very heterogeneous.
The main goal of this thesis is to ease the use of standard deliberative techniques in usecase
oriented cognitive architectures for autonomous systems. This thesis contributes
with new declarative languages to model use cases, new control architectures, new software
developments and new methodological guidelines of how to apply these concepts
in engineering processes. To justify the contributions, this thesis presents the design
of NAOTherapist, an autonomous social robot for upper-limb pediatric rehabilitation.
Its control architecture is a prototype that maximizes its generalization capabilities.
However, several limitations arose when reusing this architecture in other projects as
the Clarc robot (geriatric assessment) and a CoBot robot (office delivery tasks). The
discussion about NAOTherapist is used to highlight these limitations and determine
how to overcome them. The main implementation after all these approaches is Mlaras
(Multi-Layered ARchitecture for Autonomous Systems), which is a generic architecture
to ease the development of autonomous intelligent systems. It also allows non-expert
users to directly modify it to refine the use-case definition. Mlaras is focused on automated
planning as the core of its deliberative processes, which are separated into
several layers to take advantage of the hierarchical abstraction levels present in many
use cases. An instance of Mlaras has been developed for the autonomous agents of a
simulated logistics competition use case to further evaluate the capabilities of the new
architecture. The experimentation concludes that the contributions help to fill the gap
between the use case definitions and the actual developed applications.
Description
Mención Internacional en el título de doctor
Keywords
Autonomous systems, Control architectures, Layered deliberation, Automated planning, Use cases, Robotics