Stacked Modulation Architecture for Simultaneous Exploration and Navigation of a Biped Robot

A new control architecture for real-world-oriented robots is presented. Awareness of the issue lies in the conventional subsumption architecture, in which outputs from multiple layers often conflict with each other and a naive prioritization of the upper layer by an override of the lower layer reduces the system responsivity against accidental events. The proposed architecture fundamentally avoids such a conflict in a way that the upper-layers modify functions of the lower layers through modulations of internal parameters in them and make the sole output from the bottom layer adapt to situations. This architecture provides a design criterion of each unit function module such that it accepts incomplete and noisy information from the upper-layer modules asynchronously. Simultaneous exploration and navigation (SEAN) system for a biped robot was implemented based on the architecture and evaluated on a computer simulation.