Robotic control: real-time architectures and multi-flock flocking

Autonomous robotics has become a popular research topic in the recent years. This dissertation deals with two areas of autonomous robotic research. The first area covered is mobile robot control architectures. The second area covered is robot flocking. The dissertation first asks the question: should mobile robot control architectures include real-time capabilities. This is answered by creating, implementing and testing a real-time aware behavior-based mobile robot control architecture. Next a true real-time behavior-based mobile robot control architecture is created and implemented using Sun's Solaris real-time operating system and the Java Real Time System programming language. Then the architecture is implemented using C++ and the Open Robot Control Software to see if the real-time behavior-based mobile robot control architecture is platform and language independent. Experiments are then run comparing the different implementations of the two architectures. Finally the topic of multi-flock flocking is discussed. Multi-flock cooperation is added to an existing single flock algorithm. Both algorithms are implemented and simulated comparing the two flocking algorithms. (Published By University of Alabama Libraries