The Remote Agent (RA) integrates a broad spectrum of robotic capabilities, including planning, scheduling, execution, monitoring, failure detection, diagnosis, and recovery. The RA Executive (EXEC) can be viewed as the core of the agent. The capabilities built into EXEC have been useful in moving from a set of separate components to a fully integrated robotic agent. Since the abstract capabilities enable software developers to think about the robot at a higher level, these capabilities also support the reuse of knowledge and code across multiple robot applications. These capabilities include a high-level procedural action-description language, a multi-threaded operating system, services for resource management and configuration management, support for closed-loop plan execution and replanning, routines for executing routine low-level command sequences, a framework for specifying fault responses, and a way to implement a top-level loop including behavior during initialization, safe modes, and responses to plan failures. We believe that these capabilities are required for most autonomous agents, and that executives and execution capabilities will become more essential as we attempt to develop autonomous agents of increasing capability. To this end, we are remodularizing the executive by providing each capability as a separate module so that the individual capabilities can be standardized and shared across different agent architectures.
Last updated Jan 29, 1998. Direct feedback to Barney Pell (pell@ptolemy.arc.nasa.gov)