Regulated Reactive Robotics: a formal framework

Abstract

In this paper we introduce the Regulated Reactive approach to robotics, which adds regulation (local control) to the existing Reactive Approach. Furthermore, we present a formal framework for structure-level descriptions of systems and relate those to hardware requirements. We prove that for any given behavior there exists a regulated reactive system that requires at most as many resources as an optimal reactive or hierarchical system. Furthermore, we show that for particular behaviors in which common conditions are true, reactive and hierarchical systems require more space resources than necessary as for those tasks there exist regulated reactive systems that require less resources. This makes regulated reactive systems an attractive framework for robotics design. Keywords: Reactive Robotics, Hierarchical Robotics, Regulated Reactive Robotics