Software architecture of the Autonomous Mobile Outdoor Robot AMOR

Even if outdoor robotics is gaining increasing interest, universal systems are rare to find up to now. One of them is the autonomous mobile outdoor robot (AMOR), which operates in rough terrain under arbitrary weather condition. This paper presents its software architecture and some performance figures. The whole system is designed by a modular and layered paradigm, to allow for easy reconfiguration and adaptation to new tasks. Elementary behaviours act as the fundament, which delivers the basic abilities and secures the robot. Model based components are utilized for more intelligent tasks like obstacle avoidance and local/global path planning. Robust operation in complex terrain is achieved by combining a multitude of sensors. The software architecture unifies them by introducing a virtualisation layer, which hides all hardware specific consideration from the application programmer. This way the overall system configuration can be easily adapted to the actual task without changing the high level software. Above the medium layer an object oriented system has been implemented, that is able to localise, navigate and avoid obstacles in rough terrain. The overall performance of the system has been proven by winning the first price in autonomous driving in the European Land Robot Trial (ELROB 2007) for urban and non-urban terrain. Details of the performance are given in the results.