LIBRARIES A Flexible and Innovative Platform for Autonomous Mobile Robots

The development of the CREAL progranuning language and the STACK hardware platform by the members of the CSAIL Living Machines research group has lead to a foundation upon which roboticists may build and control autonomous mobile robots. This platform, however, has been used only within this research group on a minimal number of projects. As is, there has been no published discussion on the application of CREAL and the STACK to various types of control architectures commonly used in controlling autonomous mobile robots, or any personal accounts of the successes or failures of using such a system on a hand-built robot. In this thesis I focus on these two points. I go into depth on the use and expansion of CREAL to support multiple control architectures, as well as a personal account of the construction and use of a robot that uses these architectures and hardware to accomplish various tasks. The work to be undertaken will describe the process of design, construction, debugging and implementation of a hand-built robot that performs example tasks that are similar in nature to tasks commonly performed b