CoMRoS: cooperative mobile robots stuttgart

Abstract

Project CoMRoS has the goal to develop intelligent cooperating mobile robots. Several different vehicles are to solve a single task autonomously by exchanging plans without a central control. We use {open_quotes}Robuter II{close_quotes} vehicles from Robosoft France, adapted to our needs. The standard vehicle has very little local intelligence (VME bus system) and is controlled remotely by wireless Ethernet for sending steering commands and receiving sonar sensor data. A wireless video link is used to transmit camera images. Data exchange between vehicles is then performed among the corresponding workstations. The remote control is basically used to simplify testing and debugging of robot programs. However, each vehicle can also be driven completely autonomous by using a laptop PC.