Development Of System And Application Software For Semi-autonomous Networked Mobile Robots

New networked robotic system has already combined robots and smart space. With the increasing complexity of robot's tasks, higher requirements with respect to open system structure, interaction functions and others have been put forward. Most significantly, semi-autonomous control functions of robots are highly required when dealing with the shortcomings of robot's autonomy and human's tele-operation, in order to ensure the accomplishment of complex tasks. In this dissertation, the system architecture and application software development of such networked mobile robotic system are studied. Typical autonomous and semi-autonomous service functions are developed for the application of mobile service robot in indoor environments.Based on the existing platform and the requirements of system, a three-layer networked system architecture is designed using the Robot Operating System (ROS) middleware platform, which includes a web client layer, a network service layer and a local controller layer.In the dissertation, the related research work and the difficulties in developing semi-autonomous networked mobile robot system are described, detailed requirements in the functionality, performance and communications of the system are analyzed, the details of the design and implementation of the system are given in the aspects of system operation and management, basic autonomous functions and typical semi-autonomous tasks, etc. To begin with, the basic modules in the network service layer, communication module and human-machine interface module are designed, realizing the functions of remote monitoring, online management for auxiliary resources and the decomposition and scheduling of complex tasks. Then basic autonomous behaviors of mobile robots are developed, for example, autonomous exploration and environmental mapping in unknown environments. With regard to the shortcomings of robot autonomous mode and remote control mode when dealing with complex robot tasks, a semi-autonomous control mode which consists of interactive control strategy and shared control strategy is designed. As two examples of the semi-autonomous mode, a pick-and-place task and an obstacle avoidance navigation task are developed, respectively, which ensure higher reliability in completing the tasks. Finally, a typical application scenario of service robot mobile navigation and manipulation in smart space is developed. The performance of the network robot system is estimated and the basic system functions and tasks, including the environment exploring module, the mapping module, the objects grasping module, and the obstacle avoidance navigation module are verified.