PRACSYS: an extensible architecture for composing motion controllers and planners

  • Authors:

  • Andrew Kimmel;Andrew Dobson;Zakary Littlefield;Athanasios Krontiris;James Marble;Kostas E. Bekris

  • Affiliations:

  • Computer Science Department, Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ;Computer Science Department, Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ;Computer Science Department, Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ;Computer Science Department, Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ;Computer Science Department, Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ;Computer Science Department, Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ

  • Venue:
  • SIMPAR'12 Proceedings of the Third international conference on Simulation, Modeling, and Programming for Autonomous Robots
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

This paper describes a software infrastructure for developing controllers and planners for robotic systems, referred here as PRACSYS . At the core of the software is the abstraction of a dynamical system, which, given a control, propagates its state forward in time. The platform simplifies the development of new controllers and planners and provides an extensible framework that allows complex interactions between one or many controllers, as well as motion planners. For instance, it is possible to compose many control layers over a physical system, to define multi-agent controllers that operate over many systems, to easily switch between different underlying controllers, and plan over controllers to achieve feedback-based planning. Such capabilities are especially useful for the control of hybrid and cyber-physical systems, which are important in many applications. The software is complementary and builds on top of many existing open-source contributions. It allows the use of different libraries as plugins for various modules, such as collision checking, physics-based simulation, visualization, and planning. This paper describes the overall architecture, explains important features and provides use-cases that evaluate aspects of the infrastructure.