Supporting advanced interaction capabilities on a mobile robot with a flexible control system

Building a mobile service robot for home and office environments that incorporates skilled interaction capabilities is a challenging task. The control system has to consider various demands: first, it has to manage unstructured and dynamic environments. Second, as humans are around, aspects of safety are of particular importance. This implies that the system has to be highly reactive. Third, the robot also has to be capable of carrying out dialogs to be taught or instructed. Altogether, this requires a highly integrated control framework. In this paper we present an agent-based architecture for our mobile robot BIRON in order to realize sophisticated human-robot interaction. The architecture is built in a modular fashion and controlled by a central execution supervisor using an event queue to handle asynchronous events. This execution supervisor contains an augmented finite state machine which is specified in XML and thus is highly generic. Similarly, the communication between all modules is based on XML. The overall system, therefore, is easily maintainable and extensible, as the architecture's design allows us to add new modules to the system without requiring major modifications on existing components.