An architectural framework for modeling teleoperated service robots

Abstract

Teleoperated robots are used to perform tasks that human operators cannot carry out because of the nature of the tasks themselves or the hostile nature of the working environment. Though many control architectures have been defined for developing these kinds of systems reusing common components, none has attained all its objectives because of the high variability of system behaviors. This paper presents a new architectural approach that takes into account the latest advances in robotic architectures while adopting a component-oriented approach. This approach provides a common framework for developing robotized systems with very different behaviors and for integrating intelligent components. The architecture is currently being used, tested and improved in the development of a family of teleoperated robots which perform cleaning of ship-hull surfaces.