The design of an autonomous mobile robot built to investigate behaviour based control

Within this thesis, the design of an autonomous mobile robot built as a testbed to investigate behaviour-based control in a real world environment is described. By adopting a behaviour-based control architecture the robot can respond very rapidly to environmental changes by reacting directly to sensor stimuli. A modified form of a behaviour-based control architecture has been developed for this robot. This is based on the standard subsumption architecture with the addition of a concept known as a blackboard. The blackboard allows the sharing of system state and knowledge between behaviours to help them perform their tasks. In addition, the design of a fuzzy logic navigation system is also described. This was designed to overcome one of the limitations of pure behaviour-based systems - that is, the exclusion of interaction between behaviours. Experimentation with the robot has shown that by interacting with each other through the robot's environment, the behaviours can contribute to seemingly intelligent tasks being performed.