ALLIANCE-ROS: A Software Architecture on ROS for Fault-Tolerant Cooperative Multi-Robot Systems
Submitted
Minglong Li Zhongxuan Cai Xiaodong Yi Zhiyuan Wang Yanzhen Wang Yongjun Zhang
HPCL | School of Computer, National University of Defense Technology
Programming multi-robot systems is a complicated and time-consuming work, due to two difficulties, i.e., the distributed multi-robot cooperation and the robot software reusability. ALLIANCE model is a fully distributed, fault-tolerant and behavior-based model. ROS (Robot Operating System) provides a lot of modules for single robot. In this paper, by combining both, we propose a software architecture named ALLIANCE-ROS for developing fault-tolerant cooperative multi-robot systems with a lot of software resources available. We encapsulate the ROS mechanisms and python libraries to construct the basic function units needed by the ALLIANCE model. One may inherit them in programs to construct the ALLIANCE-model-application with all ROS algorithms, modules and resources available. This work is demonstrated by an experiment of multi-robot patrol. It is constructed and tested in both the simulated and the real environment. The experimental results validate the usability and availability of ALLIANCE-ROS.
