Commanding Multi-Robot Systems with Robot Operating System using Battle Management Language

Multi-Robot Systems have become an important research topic. One of the main questions, when looking at usability of a MRS, is how it can be controlled. In this paper we describe an approach were the commanding is done by using an artificial language very similar to English, the Battle Management Language (BML). The orders can thus be created intuitively and on a high abstraction level. We developed a GUI to allow fast and efficient creating of orders for the robots system. On the robots we used the Robot Operating System (ROS). The interpretation and execution of the orders are controlled by ROS nodes. We created control nodes for every robot which handle the execution of a task for a single robot. We also created intelligent nodes for groups of robots. These nodes handle commands directed to a group of robots and split that BML order into BML orders for each robot. These orders are sent to the control nodes and executed by the robots. ROS provides numerous of libraries and tools which helps to create new robot applications. We mainly used the publish subscriber based communication capabilities. In this paper we concentrated on the architecture and how the translation of BML orders into basic ROS command is done and how feedback messages were sent back to the C2 System. This presented work is the result of cooperation between the Real Time Systems Group (RTS), Leibniz Universität Hannover, the Institute of Real-Time Learning Systems (EZLS), University of Siegen and the Fraunhofer Institute for Communication, Information Processing and Ergonomics.