Software Development Framework for Cooperating Robots with High-level Mission Specification

Abstract

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in multiple robots performing a single task through different types of collaboration. There are two software challenges when deploying collaborative robots: how to specify a cooperative mission and how to program each robot to accomplish its mission. In this paper, we propose a novel software development framework to support distributed robot systems, swarm robots, and their hybrid. We extend the service-oriented and model-based (SeMo) framework [1] to improve the robustness, scalability, and flexibility of robot collaboration. To enable a casual user to specify various types of cooperative missions easily, the high-level mission scripting language is extended with new features such as team hierarchy, group service, one-to-many communication. The script program is refined to the robot codes through two intermediate steps, strategy description and task graph generation, in the proposed framework. The viability of the proposed framework is evidenced by two preliminary experiments using real robots and a robot simulator.