Web-Based Swarm-Robots Remote Control System Research And Implementation

The ability of existing single robot is still relatively limited, and due to theactual application needs, swarm-robots system is becoming a research focus athome and abroad. However, the current technology is difficult to design a fullyautonomous swarm-robots system to work in complex and volatile environment,or to deal with difficult tasks. In addition, certain hazardous environments arenot suitable for human beings to reach. So human intervention to remote controlis very necessary, then how to design an efficient and convenient remote controlsystem also has important research value.This project takes advantage of a variety of the latest network technology todesign and implement a swarm-robots remote control system. The system can bedivided into three parts: user’s browser part, server part, and robot part. User’sbrowser part is a console web page implemented with Ajax. In order to meet thedemand for many kinds of control, the console makes a reasonable distinctionbetween functions according to the granularity of control. Server part is dividedinto three parts: web server, web application, and the program to operate serialport. As the reverse proxy of web application, web server accomplishes simpleuser authentication to simplify the web application’s logic. The web applicationis based on tornado framework, clear and concise. Based on PySerial library, theprogram to operate serial port is absolutely cross-platform. Robot partcommunicates with server part using wireless. The hardware of robot part is akind of smart car which we develop ourselves, and the software is an embeddedC program based on hardware driver library. In addition, this system also usesan IP camera to tell user the state of robot work space in real time.The design and implementation of this system involve three key technologies:(1) The correctness of system control logic: only allow one user tooperate the system remotely, and strictly control the state change of elements onconsole page, consequently avoid the error of control logic caused by externalfactors.(2) Encoding the control command: before sending control command torobot, server part encodes the command according to certain instruction format,thereby reducing the amount of data network needs to transmit, and improvingthe decoding efficiency of robot.(3) Numbering the swarm-robots dynamically: previous studies did notconsider the numbering problem of swarm-robots. And to write the staticnumber in program for each robot is extremely cumbersome, so this projectattempts to propose a registration method for numbering swarm-robots.Besides above all, this paper discusses the test method for this system oneby one module. According to the different roles of modules in system anddifferent technologies used to implement modules, the test method is alsodifferent. Test one by one module makes it easy to find the position wherecauses some problem, and to rule out potential logic errors as much as possible.