ROCI: a distributed framework for multi-robot perception and control

This paper presents ROCI, a framework for developing applications for multi-robot teams. In ROCI, each robot is considered a node, which contains several modules and may export different types of services and capabilities to other nodes. Each node runs a kernel that mediates the interactions of the robots in a team. This kernel keeps an updated database of all nodes and the functionalities that they export. Multi-robot applications can be built dynamically by connecting modules that may be running on different nodes over the network. As an example, we present an obstacle avoidance task implemented using our framework and also discuss the use of ROCI in a multi-robot scenario.

1. Introduction

As sensors, actuators, microprocessors and wireless networks become cheaper and more ubiquitous it has become increasingly attractive to consider employing teams of small robots to tackle various sensing and manipulation tasks. In order to exploit the full capabilities of these teams, we need to develop effective models and methods for programming distributed ensembles of sensors and actuators.