DEVELOPMENT OF AGENT ORIENTED ROBOT CONTROL SYSTEM

摘要

Recently, the complexity of the robot control system has increased. To construct the robot control system, various kinds of skill have been needed. Therefore, the change of the system configuration is not easy. It takes long time to construct the systems which evaluate new algorithms or new mechanisms. Maintenance or update of the system with the remote hosts are also difficult. Therefore, it is necessary to do the maintenance or the update operation on the computer which controls the robot. These mean that the robot control systems lack flexibility. Mobile agent technology (J. E. White, 1991; D. Lange and M. Oshima, 1998; ObjectSpace Inc., 1999) is expected to give some solutions for this problems. Suppose each function is achieved by its own software agent and all of them behave cooperatively, then the users do not have to know everything to design the control system. Therefore, it is also easy to reconfigure the control system. Mobile agents enable the maintenance of the robot control system with the remote hosts. Therefore, agent oriented system improves the efficiency of development, and facilitates maintaining. In this paper, we describe an agent oriented development environment for robot control system. Moreover, some prototype systems are described.