Application of the Organic Robot Control Architecture ORCA to the Six-Legged Walking Robot OSCAR

Walking robots are complex machines, which are challenging to engineer and to program. In order to master this complexity, in this article Organic Computing (OC) principles in terms of self-organisation, self-reconfiguration and self-healing are applied to a six-legged walking robot named OSCAR (Organic Self-Configuring and Adapting Robot). The Organic Robot Control Architecture ORCA, developed in the same project, provides the architectural framework. OC principles are employed on all layers of the hierarchical robot control system starting at the reflexive layer with gait generation and reflexes over the reactive behavioural layer up to the deliberative planning layer. Many experimental evaluations with OSCAR have shown that the robot is able to flexibly adapt to internal faults as well as to unforeseen environmental situations and thus continues its mission in the best still possible way.