Robotic paradigm

In robotics, a robotic paradigm is a mental model of how a robot operates. A robotic paradigm can be described by the relationship between the three basic elements of robotics: Sensing, Planning, and Acting. It can also be described by how sensory data is processed and distributed through the system, and where decisions are made.

Hierarchical/deliberative paradigm

 * The robot operates in a top-down fashion, heavy on planning.
 * The robot senses the world, plans the next action, acts; at each step the robot explicitly plans the next move.
 * All the sensing data tends to be gathered into one global world model.



The reactive paradigm

 * Sense-act type of organization.
 * The robot has multiple instances of Sense-Act couplings.
 * These couplings are concurrent processes, called behaviours, which take the local sensing data and compute the best action to take independently of what the other processes are doing.
 * The robot will do a combination of behaviours.



Hybrid deliberate/reactive paradigm

 * The robot first plans (deliberates) how to best decompose a task into subtasks (also called “mission planning”) and then what are the suitable behaviours to accomplish each subtask.
 * Then the behaviours starts executing as per the Reactive Paradigm.
 * Sensing organization is also a mixture of Hierarchical and Reactive styles; sensor data gets routed to each behaviour that needs that sensor, but is also available to the planner for construction of a task-oriented global world model.