Development and Demonstration of a General-purpose Communication Unit for a Robot Cooperation Network

Abstract

Although the development of service robots has been flourishing, they have not yet reached a large market. In this study, we have investigated network coordination of various service robots to meet more requirements. Focusing on the ease of implementation for networking various existing robots with a common communication protocol RSNP, we proposed and developed a unit system for this purpose and used it to demonstrate the operation and management of more than 30 robots at the 2019 International Robot Exhibition. This paper reports on the developed unit and demonstration experiments.