Combining multiple goals in a behavior-based architecture

The authors' experience over the years with different architectures and planning systems for mobile robots has led them to a distributed approach where an arbiter receives votes for and against commands from each subsystem and decides upon the course of action which best satisfies the current goals and constraints of the system. Centralized arbitration of votes from distributed, independent decision-making processes provides coherent, rational, goal-directed behavior while preserving real-time responsiveness to its immediate physical environment. The Distributed Architecture for Mobile Navigation (DAMN) has been successfully used to integrate various independently developed subsystems, providing systems that perform road following, cross-country navigation, or teleoperation while avoiding obstacles and meeting mission objectives. Examples of implemented systems are given. Further research will seek to more rigorously define the behavior of the system.