OCOA: An Open, Modular, Ontology Based Autonomous Robotic Agent Architecture

Ontology based Component Oriented Architecture (OCOA) is an open software architecture designed for autonomous robotic agents. It is comprised of four kinds of objects that manage and interchange information with each other on a distributed peer to peer basis. The central architectural information service in the agent is the Agent Information Manager (AIM), which is notified and notifies any capability added, updated, substracted, or failed in the agent. These capabilities are managed ontologically. The architectural knowledge base is built dynamically by the components of the agent, and all of them can be searched and found using ontology as resource and information retrieval mechanism. High level logical data processing services are performed by Common Framework objects (CFo). CFos also offer the infrastructure needed to interchange raw and ontological architectural information. The interface to physical devices is provided by Devide object Drivers (DoD). DoDs extend CFo features by incorporating device and platform dependent code wrapped in Device Input Output Drivers (DIOD). DIODs are Java Native Interface objects, which operate directly with physical devices. Therefore, OCOA uses these four kinds of objects (AIM, CFo, DoD and DIOD), giving (by replacing only DIODs) a scalable, modular, open, platform neutral, dynamic, ontology based agent architecture.