An Architecture for the Rapid Development of Robot Behaviors

We have developed a mobile platform based on the principlesof modularity and rapid development for studies robotics. Through behavior-based robot control and a unified sensor/actuator architecture we abstract away the details of communicating with the physical hardware, allowing the behavior writer to focus on and more easily develop higher-level controls. Adding to the capabilities of our robot, we have implemented a localization algorithm based on likelihood fields using a laser. Finally, we demonstrate the utility of the FeatureSet architecture in a multi-modal person following behavior which, in addition to fusing laser and vision data to track people, conditions possible tracks using voice feedback from the user.