A Blackboard-style decision-making system for multi-tier craft control and its evaluation

This article presents an approach for decision-making in support of the control of an autonomous system of multiple tiers of robots (e.g., satellite, aerial and ground) based on the Blackboard architectural style. Under the proposed approach, the system evaluates prospective approaches for goal satisfaction (identified by user selected final rules), identifies the lowest-cost solution and determines the best path to achieving the goal, via the analysis of the Blackboard rule and action set. Two different approaches to this rule and action path generation are discussed. This article presents the proposed Blackboard-style architecture for autonomous multi-tier control and describes its implementation. The benefits and drawbacks of the Blackboard-style approach are analysed, its extrapolation to the control of multiple heterogeneous craft is presented and the tradeoffs between the two approaches to rule-path generation are assessed

A Localized Autonomous Control Algorithm For Robots With Heterogeneous Capabilities In A Multi-Tier Architecture

This dissertation makes two contributions to the use of the Blackboard Architecture for command. The use of boundary nodes for data abstraction is introduced and the use of a solver-based blackboard system with pruning is proposed. It also makes contributions advancing the engineering design process in the area of command system selection for heterogeneous robotic systems. It presents and analyzes data informing decision making between centralized and distributed command systems and also characterizes the efficacy of pruning across different experimental scenarios, demonstrating when it is effective or not. Finally, it demonstrates the operations of the system, raising the technology readiness level (TRL) of the technology towards a level suitable for actual mission use. The context for this work is a multi-tier mission architecture, based on prior work by Fink on a “tier scalable” architecture. This work took a top-down approach where the superior tiers (in terms of scope of visibility) send specific commands to craft in lower tiers. While benefitting from the use of a large centralized processing center, this approach is limited in responding to failures and interference. The work presented herein has involved developing and comparatively characterizing centralized and decentralized (where superior nodes provide information and goals to the lower-level craft, but decisions are made locally) Blackboard Architecture based command systems. Blackboard Architecture advancements (a solver, pruning, boundary nodes) have been made and tested under multiple experimental conditions