Dynamic self-configuration of an ecology of robots

Abstract

There is a tendency today toward the study of distributed systems consisting of many heterogeneous, networked, cooperating robotic devices. We refer to a system of this type as an ecology of robots. We call functional configuration of this ecology a way to allocate and connect functionalities among its robots. In general, the same ecology can perform different tasks by using different configuration. Moreover, the same task can often be solved using different configurations, and which is the best one depends on the available resources. This potential flexibility of a robot ecology is reduced by the fact that, in most current approaches, configurations are pre-programmed by hand. In this paper, we propose a plan-based approach to automatically generate a preferred configuration of a robot ecology given a task, environment, and set of resources. In contrast to previous approaches, the state of the ecology is automatically acquired at planning time, and it is monitored during execution in order to reconfigure if a functionality fails. We illustrate these ideas on a specific instance of an ecology of robots, called PEIS Ecology. We also show an experiment run on our PEIS Ecology testbed, in which a robot needs to reconfigure when the original configuration fails.

Indirect Reference: Reconfiguring Distributed Sensors and Actuators

“…Thus, the configurations above could just as easily have been created by a user with access to the blackboard as by a device with access to configuration algorithms such as a planning based configurator [5].…”

“…Often tasks in this distributed environment are performed by the cooperation of many available devices. In this cooperation, a set of necessary devices are selected and configured at runtime, particularly in the PEIS-Ecology, by a dynamic selfconfiguration module [5], [6] or by a human user.…”

“…Configuration is defined as the mechanism to instantiate and connect different functionalities available in the devices that participate in the network [5]. Typically, networks of devices are configured offline, by the designer of the system or by the users of the system.…”

“…However, due to the dynamic nature of distributed robotic systems, or dynamically changing tasks, this form of static configurations are often not sufficient. Another approach uses dynamic configurators [5], [6], which uses introspection to identify the available devices and specific algorithms to compute which device functionalities should be exchanged in order to satisfy the given task. This can be performed either by generic, but computationally heavy, planning based mechanisms [5], or by cheaper ad-hoc solutions [6].…”

Autonomous functional configuration of a network robot system

“…Together, the two planners generate at run-time sequences of functional configurations that allow the network robot system to achieve, as a whole, a desired goal. This paper puts together, in a full coherent system, several pieces that were developed in our previous work on functional configurations [9][10][11]. In addition, this paper presents two novel contributions: (1) a rigorous formalization of the self-configuration problem, which allows us to prove formal properties of our configuration algorithm; and (2) a systematic series of experiments, performed on a real network robot system, called Peis-Ecology, which allows us to demonstrate the above claims regarding autonomy, flexibility and robustness.…”