Communication Within Multi-FSM Based Robotic Systems

The paper presents a robotic system design methodology based on the concept of an embodied agent decomposed into communicating subsystems, whose activities are specified in terms of FSMs invoking behaviours parameterised by transition functions and terminal conditions. In the implementation phase, this specification is transformed into a system composed of a whiteboard providing communication means and logically labelled FSMs (LLFSMs) defining the system behaviour. These concepts are used to generate the code of the robot controller. The inclusion of inter-subsystem communication model completes the resulting system design with respect to our previous work that did not account for this model. Thus communication plays a central role in this presentation. The design methodology is exemplified with a rudimentary table tennis ball-collecting robot. The presented methodology and the implementation tools are suitable and beneficial for application to the design of other robotic systems.Full Tex