A Control System for Multi-Robotic Communities

This paper describes a design, development and experience with an universal multi-robotic robot control system. The overall message-driven system concept is introduced together with its open modular architecture. Besides the description of functionalities of basic modules, the approach to the system configuration and hardware abstraction layer is discussed. The control system allows to manage different types of robots in one team, whereas each team member is able to share and interchange any information with other team members. Since a lot of robotic tasks are computationally intensive and cannot be computed onboard, the system allows to distribute selected subtasks among remote computers. The system has been designed as a test-bed for research of new algorithms from an area of cooperative robotics.