System Level Design and Conception of a System-on-a-Chip (SoC) for Cognitive Robotics

In this work, a system level design and conception of a System-on-a-Chip (SoC) for the execution of cognitive agents in robotics will be presented. The cognitive model of the Concurrent Autonomous Agent (CAA), which was already successfully applied in several robotics applications, is used as a reference for the development of the hardware architecture. This cognitive model comprises three levels that run concurrently, namely the reactive level (perception-action cycle that executes predefined behaviours), the instinctive level (receives goals from cognitive level and uses a knowledge based system for selecting behaviours in the reactive level) and the cognitive level (planning). For the development of such system level hardware model, the C++ library SystemC with Transaction Level Modelling (TLM) 2.0 will be used. A system model of a module that executes a knowledge based system is presented, followed by a system level description of a processor dedicated to the execution of the Graphplan planning algorithm. The buses interconnecting these modules are modelled by the TLM generic payload. Results from simulated experiments with complex knowledge bases for solving planning problems in different robotics contexts demonstrate the correctness of the proposed architecture. Finally, a discussion on performance gains takes place in the end.