Quality of Control and Quality of Service in Mobile Robot Navigation

Abstract

This article presents the experimental work developed to test the viability and to measure the efficiency of the intelligent control distributed architectures. To do this, a simulated navigation scenario of Braitenberg vehicles has been developed. To control the vehicles, system uses a distributed control architecture that provides support to QoS and QoC parameters to optimize de system. The architecture uses a Publish-Subscribe model, based on Data Distribution Service to send the control messages. Due to the nature of the Publish-Subscribe model, the architecture is suitable to implement event-based control systems. The architecture has been called FSACtrl. To test the efficiency, the architecture provides a set of Quality of Service parameters. In the experiment described in this paper, the performance is used as a reference. The measuring of the quality of the navigation is done through the Integrated Time Average Error as Quality of Control parameter. Tested scenarios are: an environment without quality parameter managing, an environment with a relevant message filtering and an environment with a predictive filtering determined by the type of scenario used. Results obtained show that some of the processing performed in the control nodes can be moved to the middleware to optimize the robot navigation.