Collaborative Architecture Design for Automated Deployment and Positioning of Beaconing Robots

The rising number of applications involving service robots demands more specific and custom control strategies. Under those special working conditions on-road signaling and beaconing robots are framed. Control strategies that transcend each individual robot and focus on the whole set are required, instead of treating each one as a single entity. Thus, control methodology - which usually involves both planned control as behavioral based control - will depend not only on each single robot’s parameters, but also on the parameter analysis of other group robots, taking them into account within the decision process. This paper describes an approach to a collaborative control architecture that enhances the mapping and positioning tasks of the robot, as well as the functional organization of the whole robot group. That enhancement is achieved by means of mutual recognition between system’s robots, the use of specific sensors and the sharing of robot’s position data together with its movement parameters and the information about its surroundings.