A Robot-Controlling Agent Description with Finite State Machines

Abstract

This paper presents a robotic control architecture and descriptions based on interactions between multiple software modules called agents. When we apply this agent architecture, having modularity and flexibility, to a distributed robotic system, its sufficient definition and description methods are required because each agent communicates with the others by using its own functions directly or indirectly, recognizing or referring to its own slate and those of the others. We first assigned classes to the basic agent architecture of the multiagent system. This system was constructed with object-oriented programming, which consists of data (an internal state, external information and a behavior strategy) and methods. We then defined a finite state machine (FSM) as the model that the agent refers to in taking actions corresponding to its state transition. We applied this description and the model to controlling a robotic manipulator with multiple joints. The FSM model of the agent reflects both its internal state and its joint movements, i.e., forward, backward and stop. To perform a system evaluation of this approach, we have been creating an agent development environment and describing agents that will carry out an approaching task.