* Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, Pretoria, South Africa. E-mail: mmtshali@csir.co.za.
** University of Pretoria, Pretoria, South Africa E-mail: engel@cs.up.ac.za.
In the development of mobile robotic systems, a robotic architecture plays a crucial role in interconnecting all the sub-systems and controlling the system. The design of robotic architectures for mobile autonomous robots is a challenging and complex task. With a number of existing architectures and tools to choose from, a review of the existing robotic architecture is essential. This paper surveys the different paradigms in robotic architectures. A classification of the existing robotic architectures and comparison of different proposals attributes and properties have been carried out. The paper also provides a view on the current state of designing robot architectures. It also proposes a conceptual model of a generalised robotic architecture for mobile autonomous robots.
Mobile robotic systems, autonomous robots, robotic architectures, robotics, mobile robots