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to indexR. Volpe and I. Nesnas and T. Estlin and D. Mutz and R. Petras and H. Das
Summary
CLARAty is an infrastructure to design supposedly any kind of robotic architecture, using a standard middleware layer to fill in the details of spinning motors or other actuators. The versitility that the architecture employed is impressive: anything from 6 wheeled rovers, to 4 wheeled drive bases, to tredded models was able to be described in this flexible format. The architecture is strongly object-oriented, requiring inheritance from the base classes to accomplish the goals of locomotion. This architecture is purely for locomotion - a minimal decisions layer seems to be partially implemented.
Methods
CLARAty consists of a reusable software infrastructure of classes describing locomotion, such as PID controllers, trajectory, widget_motors, and analog signalers. These classes are coupled with a particular robot's design and specific hardware to actually accomplish the driving. It wasn't clear about the ability of the infrastructure to run on various platforms, such as operating systems or chipsets, so I presume its limited by what platforms CLARAty has been built for.
In the field, the CalTech team began to use CLARAty to drive their vehicle. My understanding is that they had significant trouble getting the infrastructure to compile, and from there it was just a bag of problems. CalTech was set far behind by trying to make this structure work, since their sponsors (HP/Agilent) were one of the primary developers of the platform. CalTech eventually just gave up and wrote the system from scratch on their own.
Good idea, difficult to effectively implement, like CORBA - one size fits most, but you gotta shape it carefully first.
Keywords
reusable software layer, functional layer, decision layer
Rating
6
Bibtex Entry
@article{ volpe01claraty,
author = "R. Volpe and I. Nesnas and T. Estlin and D. Mutz and R. Petras and H. Das",
title = "The claraty architecture for robotic autonomy",
text = "R. Volpe, I. Nesnas, T. Estlin, D. Mutz, R. Petras, and H. Das. The claraty architecture for robotic autonomy.
journal = "In Proceedings of the 2001 IEEE Aerospace Conference",
month = "March",
year = "2001",
}