Interacting with Multi-Robot Systems Using BML.

摘要

Using a multi-robot system in military operations poses many control problems. Thus, the ability to formulate clear and unambiguous commands for the robots is extremely desirable. To ensure that the operator expresses clearly what needs to be done, we use Battle Management Language (BML) to command multi- robot systems. BML was developed by the military research community to express short, unambiguous orders readable by both humans and machines. BML allows the operator to command the multi-robot system using a single controller on a mobile device (e.g., a tablet). We use BML reports to send information from the robots to the BML-Graphical User Interface (GUI). Position information, operational status, task status, and information about detected units are directly transformed into BML reports. The robots also report binary data such as images, video, or lidar data. These data cannot be translated into BML because BML is limited to textual messages. Instead, the data are converted into another XML format. After conversion, they are sent to the GUI and can be stored in a central database so that other (superordinate) C2 systems can make use of it. This article presents an overview of the BML communication architecture, the BML language and the commands that can be given to robots using BML, and the BML reports system.