Towards a Service-Oriented Architecture for Teams of Heterogeneous Autonomous Robots

Developing an infrastructure for efficiently coordinating a group of autonomous robots has become a challenging need in robotics community. In recent years, the use of teams of coordinated mobile robots has been explored in several application fields such as military, exploration, surveillance, and search and rescue missions. For such fields, the use of multiple robots enable for robustness at mission accomplishment. In this paper we present a service-oriented, distributed architecture for coordinating a set of mobile robots on the way to a common goal. The main design aspects concern the ease of extendibility, scalability, re-usability and integration of rapidly changing robotic hardware and software, and the support of different application domains rather than limiting to specific tasks' requirements and algorithms. We integrate state of the art ideas such as Service-Oriented Robotics in order to achieve novel solutions. We demonstrate working cooperative autonomous operations using multiple robots with time-suitable communications. This work is an early phase of our ultimate goal, which is to have multiple heterogeneous autonomous robots forming an intelligent system that can be able to deal with highly dynamic and challenging environments such as a first responders team in search and rescue missions.