多自主移动机器人系统协调及合作控制实验平台

Experimental testbed for cooperative control and coordinated control of multi-robot systems

为了验证多自主机器人协调及合作控制方面的先进理论和算法,进行室内多自主移动机器人实验平台的设计及开发.提出基于全局视觉定位系统及单计算机多线程操作的方式来模拟多自主机器人系统的分布式控制以及基于相对信息的局部控制.全局视觉系统的使用是为了比较理想地获得机器人间的相对位置信息并且能够记录多机器人群体的运行状态,而多线程则是为了能够实现对分布式控制策略的最佳仿真.每个线程相当于一个移动机器人的控制单元,而且该线程只使用该机器人能够获知的局部信息.最终该实验平台的硬件及软件在提出的框架下得以实现.同时,通过实验研究,结果表明该实验平台可以完全适用于模拟多自主移动机器人的分布式控制.

The objective of this paper is to develop a testbed for experiment study of cooperative and coordinated control of networked autonomous mobile robots.A scenario is proposed for the experimental testbed based on a global vision positioning system and multithreading technique on a single computer.The usage of global vision positioning system is to ideally obtain the relative position information of neighbor robots to feed to the local controller of each robot and to make a record of collective behaviors of the swarm.Multiple threads are used so that the system behaves more like a distributed system where each thread acts as a control unit for each robot and utilizes only the locally available information for the robot.Finally,the experimental testbed including both hardware and software part has been established within the proposed framework.Moreover,experiments are carried out on the testbed showing that it is successful to be a platform for experiment study of distributed control of multi-robot systems.