User:JamesRichardGoodwin/Unified Design Framework for Mobile Robot Systems

Overview
This design framework is concerned with the totality of the robot system, and is not constrained to components, architectures, middleware, hardware or software. It can be used to drive requirements analysis, design and implementation of new robot systems, or the classification of existing robot systems. Furthermore, it does not impose hardware, software or communication interfaces, therefore allowing flexible integration of new and legacy robot components. The framework is expressed in the Unified Modelling Language (UML), primarily using class diagrams.

Introduction
Mobile robot engineering encompasses techniques from a wide variety of scientific and engineering domains. Electronics, mechanics, computer science, biology, chemistry, physics and psychology have all played a significant role in what is now referred to as robotics. With such a diverse background it is difficult to define the term ‘robot’. The problem is confounded by ambiguous descriptions and the overlapping of ‘Robotics’ with similarly unbounded scientific domains, such as ‘Cybernetics’ and ‘Artificial Intelligence’[5][6]. Intelligent, Autonomous and Unmanned are descriptions that immediately confuse not only the engineers of robot systems, but also the wider public. Mobile robots, such as wheeled robots and unmanned underwater vehicles, use a form of robot architecture. The term ‘robot architecture’ is commonly used to describe the software structure and its action selection methods [5]. The robot architecture provides the robot command structure and has a wide-ranging effect on the robots ability to perform its desired tasks. Further to traditional control systems, a robot’s architecture may be capable of performing deliberative actions. Traditionally, robot architectures are constrained to cognition and interaction with the vehicle. However, this work uses a unified design framework to describe the overall operation and structure of the robot system, which may include other robots, users and environments and various action selection techniques. Whereas traditionally, robot architectures have focused on abstraction of hardware and software elements, the proposed unified approach does not attempt to impose such boundaries.

Since the 1950s, three major paradigms for Robot Architectures have been proposed; these are commonly referred to as Deliberative, Reactive and Hybrid [1]. Although these state-of–the-art techniques may meet the requirements imposed upon a robot, it is difficult for an engineer to identify the most appropriate techniques and design a robot system as a whole. This work is driven by three factors. Firstly, the robotics domain is flooded with robot architectures; it is desirable to focus the robotics community by identifying a framework, which accommodates these existing architectures. Secondly, providing a standard framework used in a variety of domains increases understanding, confidence and component re-use. This greater confidence can be transferred to systems which are otherwise difficult to test, such as spacecraft. Thirdly, designing robot systems is not an easy task. This paper provides engineering processes for requirements analysis, design, implementation and classification or robot systems. The design framework is expressed using the UML [2]. This allows the robot system to be rigorously described in a visual form.