Dynamic Control of a Robotic Swarm using a Service-Oriented Architecture

Abstract

The development, deployment, and control of groups of robots is a tedious process even for experienced roboticists. Particularly in heterogeneous systems a high granularity of control and visibility is difficult to achieve. The lack of standardized interfaces and communication protocols to interconnect robots from different manufacturers makes it very difficult to develop flexible robotic applications. We propose an efficient system suited to support heterogeneous robotic swarms that can be used as a toolkit for fast prototyping of robust distributed applications. This system offers a flexible interface allowing external users to remotely control the swarm over the internet by using standardized communication protocols such as Web Services. mented telerobotic systems include the Robotic Garden [4] and KhepOnTheWeb [9]. In the industrial sector, remote control of manufacturing processes can also be distributed, but in many cases a reliable communication channel is required to ensure functionality. Usually, industrial robotic teams (e.g. a manufacturing production line) are programmed assuming no equipment failure, and the control process is centralized on a single machine which orchestrates the synchronization between different tasks and robots. However, if a robot fails, it can take a lot of time (and money) to reconfigure a new robot and integrate it in the chain to resume the task. To avoid such losses, a powerful and robust infrastructure that offers full control over a group of heterogeneous robots through the internet can be very efficient solution. Unfortunately, most telerobotic projects have been mainly focused on the control of a single robot. Our 1