Hierarchical Multi-Robot Fleet Architecture with a Kinematics-adaptive Drive System

This publication derives a flexible and hierarchical fleet control system. It incorporates a generic drive concept. The implementation of the fleet control has been made available as an open source package. It allows for the flexible composition of multiple robot units into an overall unit for the accomplishment of an overall task, e.g. the cooperative transport of a load that would be too heavy for a single system. The control unit of each robot is represented as a stackable electronic solution that becomes a general-purpose drive system through a generic software stack. Various experiments show the superiority of this hierarchical approach over the state of the art.