Commanding sensors and controlling indoor autonomous mobile robots

Any sensory system can be viewed as a passive or dumb element which provides raw data. It can also be viewed as an intelligent element which returns "analyzed" information. Finally, it can be viewed as a commanding element which sends commands to the physical system. Each of these views is used in different situations and for different tasks. Commanding sensors are an extension to the logical sensor approach in which a mapping from events to actions is added to the sensor model. In a previous paper (1995), we proposed a sensor-based distributed control scheme for mobile robots along with several simulation results. In this paper, the application of this scheme to control a real mobile robot is presented and the results of several experiments are discussed. A server-client model is used to implement this scheme where the server is a process that carries out the commands to be executed, and each client is a process with a certain task. The logical sensor approach is used to model the sensory system which provides different levels of data representation with tolerance measures and analysis.