Middleware for Multi-robot Systems

Abstract

Recent advances in robotics technology have made it viable to assign complex tasks to large numbers of inexpensive robots. The robots as an ensemble form into a multi-robot system (MRS), which can be utilized for many applications where a single robot is not efficient or feasible. MRS can be used for a wide variety of application domains such as military, agriculture, smart home, disaster relief, etc. It offers higher scalability, reliability, and efficiency as compared to single robot system. However, it is non-trivial to develop and deploy MRS applications due to many challenging issues such as distributed computation, collaboration, coordination, and real-time integration of robotic modules and services. To make the development of multi-robot applications easier, researchers have proposed various middleware architectures to provide programming abstractions that help in managing the complexity and heterogeneity of hardware and applications. With the help of middleware, an application developer can concentrate on the high-level logic of applications instead of worrying about low-level hardware and network details. In this chapter, we survey state of the art in both distributed MRS and middleware being used for developing their applications. We provide a taxonomy that can be used to classify the MRS middleware and analyze existing middleware functionalities and features. Our work will help researchers and developers in the systematic understanding of middleware for MRS and in selecting or developing the appropriate middleware based on the application requirements.

Multi-Robot Systems and Cooperative Object Transport: Communications, Platforms, and Challenges

“…Unlike physical engines, multi-robot middleware focuses on hardware and software abstraction, interoperability, dynamic source discovery and configuration, software reuse, and real-time service [83]. Usually, middleware and physical simulators work together to complete the interaction and simulation.…”

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

“…Robotic middleware can be roughly divided into three types: object‐oriented design, component‐based design, and service‐oriented design 5,20 . An overview of existing robotic middleware is shown in Table 1.…”

“…In recent years, multi‐robot systems (MRSs) have been increasingly used in different applications, for example, area exploration, 1‐3 battlefield surveillance, 4,5 and package delivery 6,7 . These applications usually require various types of robots with different functions which are realized by different sensors (e.g., camera and lidar) and actuators (e.g., gripper and mechanical arm) to work cooperatively 8,9 .…”

Reliable distribution of computational load in robot teams

“…An alternative RAMP implementation could avoid having such a single point of failure, e.g. using multi-master ROS extensions (Tiderko et al 2016;Tardioli et al 2019), or ROS2, 5 or some completely different robotic middleware like (Sahni et al 2019).…”