GraphWare: A graph‐based middleware enabling multi‐robot cooperation

Summary Multi‐robot systems are widely used to handle complex and cooperative missions in various industrial applications. Although robotic middleware has become the key to reducing the complexity of multi‐robot application development, existing works still have limitations in controlling multiple r...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Concurrency and computation Vol. 34; no. 17
Main Authors: Chen, Jinlin, Cao, Jiannong, Liang, Zhixuan, Cheng, Zhiqin, Wang, Jia
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Hoboken Wiley Subscription Services, Inc 01.08.2022
Subjects:
Completion time
Complexity
Cooperation
cooperative control
distributed multi‐robot systems
graph‐based programming abstraction
Industrial applications
Kernels
Middleware
Missions
Multiple robots
Programming
robotic middleware
Robots
Run time (computers)
Synchronism
ISSN:1532-0626, 1532-0634
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Summary Multi‐robot systems are widely used to handle complex and cooperative missions in various industrial applications. Although robotic middleware has become the key to reducing the complexity of multi‐robot application development, existing works still have limitations in controlling multiple robots to perform missions cooperatively. To enable multi‐robot cooperation, middleware should provide high‐level ion support, dynamic configuration, communication, and synchronization. In this article, we propose GraphWare, a novel middleware that provides a graph‐based programming ion and its underlying runtime kernel for programming and building multi‐robot cooperation applications. The graph‐based programming ion can express cooperative missions without exposing the complexity of managing multiple robots. The runtime kernel configures and manages multiple heterogeneous robots to intelligently perform cooperative missions. We implement GraphWare and evaluate its performance with ball collection missions which are cooperatively accomplished by a group of mobile robots, and study the fault‐tolerance, flexibility, and scalability of the middleware in the realistic simulation. The experimental results demonstrate that GraphWare facilitates the multi‐robot cooperative mission with efficient mission completion time, high success rate, and marginal runtime overhead.
Bibliography:Funding information
Germany/Hong Kong Joint Research Scheme, G‐PolyU504/19; Research Grants Council of Hong Kong, PolyU 152133/18; XJTLU Research Development Fund, RDF‐21‐01‐053
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ISSN:1532-0626
1532-0634
DOI:10.1002/cpe.6995