UNIFIED BEHAVIOR FRAMEWORK IN AN EMBEDDED ROBOT CONTROLLER

i3 Jv\ ~ 17 mar ()~Dr~y Mullins, PhD (Member) date AFIT/GCE/ENG/09-04 Robots of varying autonomy have been used to take the place of humans in dangerous tasks. While robots are considered more expendable than human beings, they are complex to develop and expensive to replace if lost. Recent technological advances produce small, inexpensive hardware platforms that are powerful enough to match robots from just a few years ago. There are many types of autonomous control architecture that can be used to control these hardware platforms. One in particular, the Unified Behavior Framework, is a flexible, responsive control architecture that is designed to simplify the control system’s design process through behavior module reuse, and provides a means to speed software development. However, it has not been applied on embedded systems in robots. This thesis presents a development of the Unified Behavior Framework on the Mini-WHEGSTM, a biologically inspired, embedded robotic platform. The Mini-WHEGSTM is a small robot that utilize wheel