Tartarus

Abstract

The pervasive Internet has lured a variety of embedded devices including sensors nodes, controller boards, smartphones, etc. to form their respective niches within its fold. With a heterogeneous set of devices acting as its nodes, using it as a mere passive entity would be a gross under-utilization of such a massive networked resource. By tethering robots as mobile nodes onto this network, it is possible to realize both the flow of information as also on-demand physical actuation. Managing the communication and control of such a Cyber-Physical System (CPS) is a complex task and calls for an integrated platform that can cater to its scalability, heterogeneity, on-the-fly programming and distributed and decentralized control. In this paper, we introduce a multiagent platform, nicknamed Tartarus, designed to network and integrate robots with other heterogeneous devices to form a CPS. Its inherent agent based technology provides a range of features which include autonomy, intelligence, distributed and decentralized control, among others. The paper describes the platform together with an implementation of a CPS integrated with robots to validate its use in real world scenarios.