The Distributed architecture for mobile navigation (DAMN) is a mobile robot architecture developed by Julio K. Rosenblatt at Carnegie Mellon University.
[1] DAMN consists of a collection of independently operating behaviors such as "go-to-goal" and "avoid obstacle", and an arbiter.
The arbiter generates a set of feasible action possibilities for the robot over a short time horizon, and the behaviours vote on (i.e. express utility for) these candidate actions.
One method of obtaining votes is for behaviours to asynchronously update a utility map over the configuration space of the robot.
In DAMN, the decision-making process is distributed and asynchronous, without the need for an hierarchical structure.