Artificial Intelligence for Robotics

Soft real-time control

The basic concept of how a robot works, especially one that drives, is fairly simple. There is a master control loop that does the same thing over and over; it reads data from the sensors and motor controller, looks for commands from the operator (or the robot's autonomy functions), makes any changes to the state of the robot based on those commands, and then sends instructions to the motors or effectors to make the robot move:

The preceding diagram illustrates how we have instantiated the OODA loop into the software and hardware of our robot. The robot can either act autonomously, or accept commands from a control station ...