Concepts of a Modular System Architecture for Distributed Robotic Systems

Abstract

Modern robots often use more than one processing unit to solve the requirements in robotics. Robots are frequently designed in a modular manner to fulfill the possibility to be extended for future tasks. The use of multiple processing units leads to a distributed system within one single robot. Therefore, the system architecture is even more important than in single-computer robots. The presented concept of a modular and distributed system architecture was designed for robotic systems. The architecture is based on the Operator-Controller Module (OCM). This article describes the adaption of the distributed OCM for mobile robots considering the requirements on such robots, including, for example, real-time and safety constraints. The presented architecture splits the system hierarchically into a three-layer structure of controllers and operators. The controllers interact directly with all sensors and actuators within the system. For that reason, hard real-time constraints need to comply. The reflective operator, however, processes the information of the controllers, which can be done by model-based principles using state machines. The cognitive operator is used to optimize the system. The article also shows the exemplary design of the DAEbot, a self-developed robot, and discusses the experience of applying these concepts on this robot.

A review of multi-agent mobile robot systems applications

“…A review of multi-agent mobile robot systems applications (Ammar Abdul Ameer Rasheed) 3521 in [40]. Since most works are centralized, there are currently few studies relevant to a decentralized MRS. As a result, a proposal for the development of a decentralized MRS for tracking and surrounding a stationary goal was suggested in [41].…”

Programming Robot Behaviors with Execution Management Functions

“…Our solution proposes to distribute the supervision among the different behaviors of the robot. Jahn et al [9] also proposes the idea of a distributed approach for execution monitoring (besides other functions) using a reflective operator [10]. In our work, we develop this idea in a different way (e.g., by identifying specific categories of executing monitoring functions) and we provide an open source software library to help programming these functions.…”

Open Distributed System Based on Trust Relationship Model

“…The proposal of trust puts forward new ideas for solving security problems in large-scale network environment. Trust based security mechanism is gradually considered as an effective method to solve security problems in open network environment [7][8]. However, the existing research still has some shortcomings in the definition of Distributed Processing System trust, the dynamic description of trust, the description of trust management and the evaluation of trust:…”