ALLIANCE-ROS: A Software Framework on ROS for Fault-Tolerant and Cooperative Mobile Robots

摘要

Programming control systems for mobile robots is complicated and time-consuming,due to three aspects,i.e.,the robot behavior coordination,the distributed multi-robot cooperation and the robot software reusability.Subsumption model is a robust control architecture for mobile robots.ALLIANCE model extends it to multirobot systems,which is a fully distributed,fault-tolerant model.Robot operating system (ROS) provides a lot of reusable robot modules.By combining the above three,we propose a software framework named ALLIANCE-ROS for developing fault-tolerant cooperative multi-robot systems with abundant software resources available.We encapsulate the ROS facilities to build the framework prototype.We also use some high-performance plugin-besed mechanism to optimize the bottom of the framework.One may use the framework-provided API conveniently to construct single-robot and multi-robot applications with all ROS resources available.This work is demonstrated by three application cases including an autonomous roving robot,a security patrol robot and multiple patrol robots.They are constructed and tested in both the simulated and the real environment.The experimental results validate the usability and availability of ALLIANCE-ROS.