ARIES: An Autonomous Controller For Multirobot Cooperation

Abstract

This paper is focused in cooperative robotics research, particularly for space exploration missions. To do this, we proposed an autonomous controller developed to deploy cooperative heterogeneous robot systems which combine and coordinate their functionalities to achieve scientific targets in challenging scenarios. Contrary to other autonomous controllers, ARIES is a multiagent architecture which brings the T-REX framework and the hierarchical leader -follower approach together. This scheme allows ARIES to provide a distributed execution and a centralized deliberation into the leader, as well as scalability and flexibility to control multiple robotic platforms. Also, the hierarchical scheme provides an affordable way to implement and deploy fail recover mechanisms in ARIES to create fault-tolerant instances of the architecture.