Decision support for designing autonomous robot systems

Designing autonomous robot systems is a multidimensional problem. Special features of autonomous robots - sensing and perception, decision making and reasoning, robust and safe behavior - lead to many common and well known concepts and technologies to be considered. A system designer will face requirements often common to an application domain, against which the available technologies for autonomy need to be matched and evaluated. We report experiences using a decision support systemto facilitate the decision making when selecting solutions (technologies) for autonomous robotic systems. Essentially, such a robotic system should be resilient, robust and collaborative. A user can utilize a KB and decision making tool for a common or more specific user's problem, like a part identification problem, i.e., what sensor technology is suitable for particular part identification.