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Distributed Architecture for Mobile Navigation (DAMN)
This project is no longer active.

Head: Julio Rosenblatt
Contact: Chuck Thorpe (thorpe@qatar.cmu.edu)

Mailing address:
Carnegie Mellon University
Robotics Institute
5000 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15213

Associated center: VASC
Associated lab/group: NavLab

Project Description

The Distributed Architecture for Mobile Navigation, or DAMN, consists of a group of distributed behaviors communicating with a centralized command arbiter, sending votes in favor of actions that satisfy its objectives and against those actions which do not. The arbiter is then responsible for combining the behaviors' votes and generating actions which reflects their objectives and priorities, thus providing the responsiveness and robustness of behavior-based systems without sacrificing the coherence and rationality of centralized architectures.

Various voting schemes have been implemented that allow for the simultaneous satisfaction of multiple goals and objectives in a distributed system. One such voting scheme is a fuzzy logic type of approach where behaviors express their preferences among a set of possible actions; the arbiter sums these votes and selects the maximum. The second is a schema-based type of approach where behaviors instead indicate the utility of possible world states; the arbiter then maintains a local utility map and evaluates possible actions within it.

DAMN has been used to create various systems for mobile robot navigation and active sensor control. Diverse subsystems have been integrated within this architecture to create systems that, for example, perform road following, cross-country navigation, map-based route following, and teleoperation while avoiding obstacles and meeting mission objectives.

Past members

	Name	Title	Email Address
	Julio Rosenblatt	PhD Student, RI
	Chuck Thorpe	Dean, Qatar Campus	thorpe@qatar.cmu.edu

Past Sub-projects

A Reactive System for Off-Road Autonomous Driving - We have developed an integrated obstacle avoidance system for on-road driving for avoiding discrete obstacles, or for off-road driving for avoiding untraversable regions of terrain.

Publications

Note: This list may not be comprehensive. It contains only those publications in the RI publications database. Entries are listed in reverse chronological order.

• DAMN: A Distributed Architecture for Mobile Navigation
  J. Rosenblatt
  doctoral dissertation, tech. report CMU-RI-TR-97-01, Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, January, 1997. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [0 KB], ps.gz [2898 KB] copyrighted

• DAMN: A Distributed Architecture for Mobile Navigation
  J. Rosenblatt
  Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 9, No. 2 / 3, 1997, pp. 339 - 360.
  Download: pdf [95 KB], ps.gz [82 KB] copyrighted

• Combining Multiple Goals in a Behavior-Based Architecture
  J. Rosenblatt and C. Thorpe
  IEEE Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, Human Robot Interaction and Cooperative Robots (IROS '95), Vol. 1, August, 1995, pp. 136 - 141. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [40 KB], ps.gz [38 KB] copyrighted

• DAMN: A Distributed Architecture for Mobile Navigation
  J. Rosenblatt
  Proceedings of the 1995 AAAI SpringSymposium on Lessons Learned from Implemented Software Architectures for Physical Agents, AAAI Press, March, 1995.
  Download: pdf [0 KB], ps.gz [60 KB] copyrighted

• A Behavior-Based System for Off-Road Navigation
  D. Langer, J. Rosenblatt, and M. Hebert
  IEEE Trans. Robotics and Automation, Vol. 10, No. 6, December, 1994, pp. 776-782.
  Download: pdf [242 KB], ps.gz [801 KB] copyrighted

• An Integrated System for Autonomous Off-Road Navigation
  D. Langer, J. Rosenblatt, and M. Hebert
  Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. on Robotics and Automation, May, 1994.
  Download: pdf [249 KB], ps.gz [1171 KB] copyrighted