Toward a real-time heterogeneous mobile robotic swarm: Robot platform and agent architecture

Abstract

In this paper we present a robot platform and a robot agent architecture for a real-time heterogeneous mobile robotic swarm. The robot platform is a modularized distributed architecture structured along three conceptual layers: sensor, actuation and the main unit. Each module is mechanically and electronically independent. The agent architecture has a distributed design with seven modules that is aimed at satisfying the constrains of many dynamic real world environments. The agent processes are organized in three categories: hard real-time behaviors, soft real-time behaviors and non-time-critical reasoning. The distributed architecture of the platform and the agent enable the robotic swarm to make efficient use of its resources and provide a flexible base for investigating many of the still open research questions for multi-robot systems.