Moduling And Control Of Component Based System For Guide Robot

Robotics has been rapidly extended to non-industrial applications in recent years, guide robots (GR) as an important members of the service robot family, are widely used in welcome, guide, shopping guide, transportation, cleaning, patrol, elder care and other fields. These robots face complex unstructured working environments, provide diversified services, and need integrate different functional components to accomplish special tasks. This makes them great flexibility and uncertainty. Researchers have developed a variety of welcome robot prototype, but lacking of modularization and standardization theory, it makes high cost in robot development process, it is difficult to make them universal. Robot middleware technology can shield the differences of operating systems and developing languages and network protocols, provides a variety of communication mechanisms for robotic systems, it is an effective way to eliminate heterogeneous problems of robotic system.However, there are new problems in the component based design process for guide robots:(1) The traditional robot system based on component lacks the ability of the dynamic collaborative management in the non-structural environment;(2) The behaviors of individual components in the system have asynchronous events, concurrency and other features, along with the number of components increasing, coordination control of all components will become more complex, requires using the formal modeling method to build precise mathematical model for the robot component based system, analysis and forecast system in operation in various situations, to ensure the guide robot component system stable.(3) Given the requirements of guide robot component-based system, integrate robot technology middleware, Petri net formal modeling technique to study developing methods and theories for guide robot system. Design and implement a guide robot prototype system and conduct the related experiments.The main contents are shown as follows:1) Guide robot component based collaborative simulation system design and implementation: given the requirements, develop the component based collaborative simulation system which uses CORBA as the software bus and robot technology middleware (RTM) as the basic architecture.2) Market based mechanism to coordinate control of robot components: propose a market-based collaborative control method, it is used as strategies in component failure or communication congestion the dynamic unstructured environments to ensure the .system reliable.3) Formal modeling and analysis of Modular Petri Net (MPN) for GR components system: proposed task model of guide robot component system, and provide the analysis method of modular petri net system's reachablity, deadlock and other characteristics to analyze and predict the system's various states, provide reasonable protection for collaborative programming of GR system.The MPN theory is applied to the robot technology middleware based GR system, provoide accurate modeling, analysis and prediction of the collaborative programming for robot component system. The research results will contribute to the guide robot component system into practical applications, with some economic value and social significance.