The Driving Pipeline: A Pipelined Architecture for Outdoor Mobile Robots

The Driving Pipeline is a driving control scheme for a mobile robot that drives the robot vehicle outdoors continuously and adaptively. Although the basic idea of the Driving Pipeline originates from a pipelined computer architecture, the Driving Pipeline adopts more complex execution management for adaptive vehicle motion. Like the pipelined computer architecture, the Driving Pipeline segments necessary computation for robot vehicle motion into several successive subprocesses and executes them on the pipelined processing modules that operate in parapel. Because of this pipelined architecture, the Driving Pipeline offers high computation performance, and then vehicle's high speed and continuous motion. Unlike the pipelined computer architecture, however, the Driving Pipeline adjusts execution cycles in order to adapt vehicle motion both to driving environment and computation resources in robot systems. For adaptive control, the Driving Pipeline introduces control parameters and defines required relations among them. Because of the explicit control scheme, the Driving Pipeline not only enables adaptive control but also analyzes the robot navigation. The Driving Pipeline illustrates mid level navigation between the driving control and the high level map navigation. Introducing this navigation layer offers more adaptability to the environment.