EXPERT SYSTEMS AND SOLUTIONS

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PAIYANOOR, OMR, CHENNAI
Call For Research Projects Final
year students of B.E in EEE, ECE,
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CS 491/691(X) - Lecture 8 1
Topics: Introduction to
Robotics
CS 491/691(X)

Lecture 8
Instructor: Monica Nicolescu
 Review
Control Architectures
• Languages for robot control

• Computability

• Organizing principles

• Architecture selection criteria

• Reactive control

CS 491/691(X) - Lecture 8 3
 Reactive Control
• Reactive control is based on tight (feedback) loops
connecting a robot's sensors with its effectors
• Purely reactive systems do not use any internal
representations of the environment, and do not
look ahead
– They work on a short time-scale and react to the current
sensory information
• Reactive systems use minimal, if any, state
information

CS 491/691(X) - Lecture 8 4
 Collections of Rules
• Reactive systems consist of collections of reactive
rules that map specific situations to specific actions
• Analog to stimulus-response, reflexes
– Bypassing the “brain” allows reflexes to be very fast
• Rules are running concurrently and in parallel
• Situations
– Are extracted directly from sensory input
• Actions
– Are the responses of the system (behaviors)

CS 491/691(X) - Lecture 8 5
 Mutually Exclusive Situations
• If the set of situations is mutually exclusive:
 only one situation can be met at a given time
 only one action can be activated
• Often is difficult to split up the situations this way
• To have mutually exclusive situations the
controller must encode rules for all possible
sensory combinations, from all sensors
• This space grows exponentially with the number of
sensors

CS 491/691(X) - Lecture 8 6
 Complete Control Space
• The entire state space of the robot consists of all
possible combinations of the internal and external
states
• A complete mapping from these states to actions is
needed such that the robot can respond to all
possibilities
• This is would be a tedious job and would result in a
very large look-up table that takes a long time to
search
• Reactive systems use parallel concurrent reactive
rules  parallel architecture, multi-tasking
CS 491/691(X) - Lecture 8 7
 Incomplete Mappings
• In general, complete mappings are not used in hand-
designed reactive systems
• The most important situations trigger the
appropriate reactions
• Default responses are used to cover all other cases
• E.g.: a reactive safe-navigation controller
If left whisker bent then turn right
If right whisker bent then turn left
If both whiskers bent then back up and turn left
Otherwise, keep going
CS 491/691(X) - Lecture 8 8
 Action Selection
• If the rules are not triggered by unique mutually-
exclusive conditions, more than one rule can be
triggered at the same time
 Two or more different commands are sent to the
actuators
• Deciding which action to take is called action selection
• Arbitration: decide among multiple actions or
behaviors
• Fusion: combine multiple actions to produce a single
command

CS 491/691(X) - Lecture 8 9
 Arbitration
• There are many different types of arbitration
• Arbitration can be done based on:
• a fixed priority hierarchy
– rules have pre-assigned priorities
• a dynamic hierarchy
– rules priorities change at run-time
• learning
– rule priorities may be initialized and are learned at run-
time, once or continuously

CS 491/691(X) - Lecture 8 10
 Multi-Tasking
• Arbitration decides which one action to execute
• To respond to any rule that might become triggered
all rules have to be monitored in parallel, and
concurrently
If no obstacle in front  move forward
If obstacle in front  stop and turn away
Wait for 30 seconds, then turn in a random direction
• Monitoring sensors in sequence may lead to missing
important events, or failing to react in real time
• Reactive systems must support parallelism
– The underlying programming language must have multi-
tasking abilities CS 491/691(X) - Lecture 8 11
 Designing Reactive Systems
• How to can we put together multiple (large number)
of rules to produce effective, reliable and goal
directed behavior?

• How do we organize a reactive controller in a

principled way?

• The best known reactive architecture is the

Subsumption Architecture (Rod Brooks, MIT,
1985)
CS 491/691(X) - Lecture 8 12
 Vertical v. Horizontal Systems

Traditional (SPA):
sense – plan – act

Subsumption:

CS 491/691(X) - Lecture 8 13
 Biological Inspiration
• The inspiration behind the Subsumption Architecture
is the evolutionary process:
– New competencies are introduced based on existing ones

• Complete creatures are not thrown out and new

ones created from scratch
– Instead, solid, useful substrates are used to build up to
more complex capabilities

CS 491/691(X) - Lecture 8 14
 The Subsumption Architecture

• Principles of design
– systems are built from
the bottom up
– components are task-achieving
actions/behaviors (avoid-obstacles, find-doors, visit-rooms)
– all rules can be executed in parallel, not in a sequence
– components are organized in layers, from the bottom up
– lowest layers handle most basic tasks
– newly added components and layers exploit the existing
ones

CS 491/691(X) - Lecture 8 15
 Subsumption System Design
• What makes a Subsumption Layer, what should go
where?

• There is no strict recipe, but some solutions are

better than others, and most are derived empirically

• How exactly layers are split up depends on the

specifics of the robot, the environment, and the task

CS 491/691(X) - Lecture 8 16
 Designing in Subsumption
• Qualitatively specify the overall behavior needed
for the task
• Decompose that into specific and independent
behaviors (layers)
• Determine behavior granularity
• Ground low-level behaviors in the robot’s sensors
and effectors
• Incrementally build, test, and add

CS 491/691(X) - Lecture 8 17
 Subsumption Layers
• First, we design, implement and debug
layer 0
• Next, we design layer 1
– When layer 1 is designed, layer 0 is level 2

taken into consideration and utilized, its

level 1
existence is subsumed (thus the name of
the architecture) level 0

– As layer 1 is added, layer 0 continues to

function sensors actuators
• Continue designing layers, until the
desired task is achieved

CS 491/691(X) - Lecture 8 18
 Suppression and Inhibition
• Higher layers can disable the ones below
– Avoid-obstacles can stop the robot from moving around
• Layer 2 can either:
– Inhibit the output of level 1 or
– Suppress the input of level 1
• The process is continued all the way to the top level
level 2
inhibitor

level 1 s
inputs AFSM outputs

I
level 0
suppressor

sensors actuatorsCS 491/691(X) - Lecture 8 19

 Subsumption Language and AFSMs

• The original Subsumption Architecture was

implemented using the Subsumption Language
• It was based on finite state machines (FSMs)
augmented with a very small amount of state (AFSMs)
• AFSMs were implemented in Lisp
inhibitor

s
inputs AFSM outputs

I
suppressor

CS 491/691(X) - Lecture 8 20
 Subsumption Language and AFSMs
• Each behavior is represented as an augmented finite state
machine (AFSMs) collide inhibitor

s
• Stimulus (input) or response sonar inputs AFSM outputs halt
I
(output) can be inhibited or
suppressor

suppressed by other active behaviors

• An AFSM can be in one state at a time, can receive one or
more inputs, and send one or more outputs
• AFSMs are connected communication wires, which pass
input and output messages between them; only the last
message is kept
• AFSMs run asynchronously
CS 491/691(X) - Lecture 8 21
 Networks of AFSMs
• Layers represent task achieving behaviors

– Wandering, avoidance, goal seeking

level 2
• Layers work concurrently and asynchronously

• A Subsumption Architecture controller, level 1

using the AFSM-based programming level 0

language, is a network of AFSMs divided into

layers
• Convenient for incremental system design

CS 491/691(X) - Lecture 8 22
 Wandering in Subsumption
• Brooks ‘87

CS 491/691(X) - Lecture 8 23
 Layering in AFSM Networks
• Once a basic competence is achieved (e.g., moving around
safely), it can be labeled as layer 0
• Layer 1 (e.g., one that looks for objects and collects them),
can then be added on top and communication is done through
wires
• The use of layers is meant to modularize the reactive system,
so it is bad design to put a lot of behaviors within a single
layer
• Also, it is bad design to put a large number of connections
between the layers, so that they are strongly coupled

CS 491/691(X) - Lecture 8 24
 Module Independence
• Strong coupling implies dependence between
modules, which violates the modularity of the system
• If modules are interdependent, they are not as robust
to failure
• In Subsumption, if higher layers fail, the lower ones
remain unaffected
• Thus Subsumption has one-way independence
between layers
• Two-way independence is not practical, why?

CS 491/691(X) - Lecture 8 25
 Layering in AFSM Networks
• With upward independence, a higher layer can
always use a lower one
•  layer 1 certainly can and should be coupled with
layer 0. How?
• …by using suppression and inhibition

• Do we always have to use these wires to

communicate between parts of the system?

CS 491/691(X) - Lecture 8 26
 Using the World
• How can you sequence activities in Subsumption?

• Coupling between layers need not be through the

system itself (i.e., not through explicit
communication wires)

• It could be through the world. How?

CS 491/691(X) - Lecture 8 27
 Collecting Soda Cans
• Herbert collected empty soda cans
and took them home
• Herbert’s capabilities
– Move around without running into
obstacles
– Detect soda cans using a camera and a
laser
– An arm that could: extend, sense if there
is a can in the gripper, close the gripper,
tuck the arm in

CS 491/691(X) - Lecture 8 28
 Herbert
• Look for soda cans, when seeing one approach it
• When close, extend the arm toward the soda can
• If the gripper sensors detect something close the
gripper
• If can is heavy, put it down, otherwise pick it up
• If gripper was closed tuck the arm in and head home

• The robot did not keep internal state about what

it had just done and what it should do next: it
just sensed!
CS 491/691(X) - Lecture 8 29
Readings

• M. Matarić: Chapter 14

CS 491/691(X) - Lecture 8 30