Authors:
Alejandro Morales
1
;
Miguel A. Gutiérrez
1
;
Jose A. Vicente
2
;
Vidal Moreno
2
and
Belén Curto
2
Affiliations:
1
Universidad Católica de Ávila, Spain
;
2
Universidad de Salamanca, Spain
Keyword(s):
Software Platform, Architectures, Distributed System Control, Autonomous, Mobile, Robots, Environment.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Control and Supervision Systems
;
Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics
;
Mobile Robots and Autonomous Systems
;
Network Robotics
;
Robot Design, Development and Control
;
Robotics and Automation
;
Vehicle Control Applications
Abstract:
This article describes a software platform that allows to control multiple robots of any type, through wireless connections and without needing to modify its code to control each particular robot. It is a platform with an architecture in three layers, that uses the robotics device server Player as intermediate layer. The most abstract layer of the architecture is composed by the applications of control elaborated in any language that has socket support. These applications use the interfaces that Player offers to the control of the devices, so that the access to it is transparent. A server application is the most specialized layer that runs on the robot, and it manages the sensors and actuators devices of the robot at Player’s requests. The platform presents two interesting aspects, the first is that allows to control any robot, without having to develop specific drivers in Player that allow to control their devices. That is to say, it is not necessary to modify the code of the platfo
rm to integrate a new robot, simply it is necessary to adapt a model of server application, which accedes to the devices, to the robot that is wanted to integrate. The second one, is the possibility of controlling multiples robots simultaneously through wireless connections (also it admits serial connections). Also, it allows to create valid control programs for any robot, without needing to know its operation and architecture. By these reasons, it constitutes a very valid enviroment to work with multi-robot distributed systems.
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