Exploration and mapping for unstructured robot teams

As the applications of mobile robot teams become more complex, the impracticality of designing custom solutions is becoming increasingly obvious. A new approach to control system design is required to facilitate the development of modular and scalable systems. Control ad libitum is an approach that decouples the software and hardware design of robot teams, allowing the system to adapt to changing hardware and simplifying the process of adding functionality to the control system. The “Host, Avatar, Agent” control architecture was developed utilizing this approach and preliminary experimental results from an exploration and mapping scenario are presented here. The experimental results demonstrate the viability of the architecture, specifically in the areas of modularity and scalability, and provide some insights into how such a system could work for real-world applications.

[1]  Nak Young Chong,et al.  Decentralized Formation Control for a Team of Anonymous Mobile Robots , 2006 .

[2]  Hidenori Kimura,et al.  Implementing distributed control system for intelligent mobile robot , 2004, Artificial Life and Robotics.

[3]  A. Shirkhodaie,et al.  Cooperative visual team working and target tracking of mobile robots , 2002, Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth Southeastern Symposium on System Theory (Cat. No.02EX540).

[4]  Teodiano Freire Bastos Filho,et al.  Nonlinear Control Techniques and Omnidirectional Vision for Team Formation on Cooperative Robotics , 2007, Proceedings 2007 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[5]  Ying Wang,et al.  Multi-robot Box-pushing: Single-Agent Q-Learning vs. Team Q-Learning , 2006, 2006 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[6]  Tim Kindberg,et al.  Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design (4th Edition) (International Computer Science) , 2005 .

[7]  Kazuhiro Ohkura,et al.  A homogeneous mobile robot team that is fault-tolerant , 2006, Adv. Eng. Informatics.

[8]  Tucker R. Balch,et al.  Communication, Diversity and Learning: Cornerstones of Swarm Behavior , 2004, Swarm Robotics.

[9]  Liuba Shrira,et al.  Providing high availability using lazy replication , 1992, TOCS.

[10]  Tucker R. Balch,et al.  Spirits: Using Virtualization and Pervasiveness to Manage Mobile Robot Software Systems , 2006, SelfMan.

[11]  Gaurav S. Sukhatme,et al.  Experiments with a Large Heterogeneous Mobile Robot Team: Exploration, Mapping, Deployment and Detection , 2006, Int. J. Robotics Res..

[12]  Ronald C. Arkin,et al.  Learning to role-switch in multi-robot systems , 2003, 2003 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (Cat. No.03CH37422).

[13]  Tatsushi Nishi,et al.  An asynchronous distributed routing system for multi-robot cooperative transportation , 2005, 2005 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[14]  George Coulouris,et al.  Distributed systems - concepts and design , 1988 .

[15]  Enric Cervera,et al.  Practical multi-robot applications with player and JADE , 2008, 2008 10th International Conference on Control, Automation, Robotics and Vision.

[16]  Andrzej Kasiński,et al.  Perception network for the team of indoor mobile robots: concept, architecture, implementation , 2001 .

[17]  Adrian Martin,et al.  Control AD Libitum : An approach to real-time construction of control systems for unstructured robotic teams , 2009 .

[18]  Inci Sariçiçek,et al.  Project-oriented task scheduling for mobile robot team , 2009, J. Intell. Manuf..

[19]  Brett Browning,et al.  Dynamically formed heterogeneous robot teams performing tightly-coordinated tasks , 2006, Proceedings 2006 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2006. ICRA 2006..

[20]  Maria L. Gini,et al.  Resource scheduling and load balancing in distributed robotic control systems , 2003, Robotics Auton. Syst..

[21]  Kouhei Ohnishi,et al.  Mobile robot teamwork for cooperated task , 2002, IEEE 2002 28th Annual Conference of the Industrial Electronics Society. IECON 02.

[22]  Maria L. Gini,et al.  Performance of a distributed robotic system using shared communications channels , 2002, IEEE Trans. Robotics Autom..