$$DSR_d$$: A Proposal for a Low-Latency, Distributed Working Memory for CORTEX

Robotics Cognitive Architectures (RCA) are becoming a key element in the design of robots that need to be aware of its surrounding space and of their role in it. This is especially important for robots that interact with people in household, eldercare or industrial collaborative scenarios. We have proposed in earlier works an RCA called CORTEX designed for social robots operating in HRI environments. One of CORTEX’s main elements is a working memory designed as a graph-like data structure that is accessed by all the computational modules in charge of some relevant function in the system. Our current implementation is based on the concept of a real-time database, where one of the modules stores, receives and publishes changes to all modules. In this paper, we propose a new design of this element based on the Conflict-free Distributed Replicated Data Types (CRDT) theory of distributed data types. The new working memory presents important advantages over existing designs that are demonstrated with several experiments.