A Robot Team for Exploration and Surveillance: Design and Architecture

Abstract

A novel architecture for distributed control of a team of heterogeneous mobile robots is introduced. Design as well as implementation details are presented. An example application for a surveillance task is discussed. 1 Introduction Writing control software for mobile robots is a non-trivial task due to the needs of operating in noisy and cluttered environments. Additional complexity is introduced by inter-robot communication over a wireless network. This imposes constraints on the bandwidth, maximum distances between robots, and the need for error correction. Additional planning must be introduced to effectively control robots with heterogeneous capabilities. If a robot malfunctions, the team's performance must gracefully degrade and not fail outright. As discussed by Coste-Mani`ere and Simmons [2], a good architecture is vital to the construction of working robotic systems. We propose an architecture for multi-robot control that treats a distributed network of robots as a set...