Robotic paradigm

In robotics, a robotic paradigm is a mental model of how a robot operates. A robotic paradigm can be described by the relationship between the three basic elements of robotics: Sensing, Planning, and Acting. It can also be described by how sensory data is processed and distributed through the system, and where decisions are made.

Hierarchical/deliberative paradigm

* The robot operates in a top-down fashion, heavy on planning.
* The robot senses the world, plans the next action, acts; at each step the robot explicitly plans the next move.
* All the sensing data tends to be gathered into one global world model.

The reactive paradigm

* Sense-act type of organization.
* The robot has multiple instances of Sense-Act couplings.
* These couplings are concurrent processes, called behaviours, which take the local sensing data and compute the best action to take independently of what the other processes are doing.
* The robot will do a combination of behaviours.

Hybrid deliberate/reactive paradigm

* The robot first plans (deliberates) how to best decompose a task into subtasks (also called “mission planning”) and then what are the suitable behaviours to accomplish each subtask.
* Then the behaviours starts executing as per the Reactive Paradigm.
* Sensing organization is also a mixture of Hierarchical and Reactive styles; sensor data gets routed to each behaviour that needs that sensor, but is also available to the planner for construction of a task-oriented global world model.

See also

* Behavior-based robotics
* Hierarchical control system
* Subsumption architecture

References

* Asada, H. & Slotine, J.-J. E. (1986). Robot Analysis and Control. Wiley. .
* Arkin, Ronald C. (1998). Behavior-Based Robotics. MIT Press. .

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