Research And Implementation Of A Generic Development Framework For Swarm Robotics System

Robot technology has been widely concerned and developed rapidly in recent years and it has been applied to industrial manufacturing,medical services,defense and military affairs and other aspects.With the continuous expansion of application areas,single robots can not meet our needs in some scenes.Compared with single robots,swarm robotics system has better robustness,adaptability and expansibility and has been paid more and more attention and research.However,programming swarm robotics system is quite difficult for two reasons.Firstly,lacking of dedicated software development tools.Secondly,no good software ecology.ROS is the standard of fact for single robot and multi-robot system in software development and has a good software ecology.Therefore,it is of great theoretical and practical significance to study the key aspects of consistent data sharing,swarm programming model and swarm intelligence algorithm,so as to realize a generic software development framework which can be compatible with ROS for swarm robotics system.A distributed architecture for swarm robotics based on the two-layer computation graph has been proposed on the basis of the characteristics of the communication of swarm robotics system and the research and analysis of the ROS computation graph.On each single robot there is a complete but independent ROS coupatation graph,and the whole swarm system construct to a large-scale and dynamic swarm computation graph through neighborhood communication.Through the two-layer computation graph structure,we can reuse the ROS ecology and the swarm system as a whole is a decentralized structure which has better scalability.An efficient swarm consensus mechanism SCDS(Swarm Consistent Data Sharing)has been designed and implemented.Based on the analysis of read and write operations of the Virtual Stigmergy,SCDS presents a rewrite-estimate strategy and a distinction of hot and cold data algorithm,which improves the read and write operations respectively.Finally,an efficient and consistent distributed tuple space is designed and implemented.A distributed particle swarm algorithm SCDS-based PSO which is suitable for swarm robotics system has been proposed and a top-down swarm intelligence optimization primitives have been designed and implemented.This method combines the SCDS consensus mechanism with the classical PSO algorithm to solve the global optimal value update problem.Then,based on the newly proposed algorithm to design the programming primitives and provide developers with top-down programming interface.A generice software development framework for swarm robotics GSDF has been designed and implemented based on the above-mentioned distributed architecture,SCDS consensus mechanism,swarm programming model and so on.A lot of experiment and performance analysis based on GSDF has been completed.In the Stage and Gazebo simulator,three classic swarm behaviors including pattern formation,pattern segregation and self-organizing flocking,are designed and implemented.Based on the swarm uav experiment system Beebot,the self-organizing flocking behavior of micro four-rotor UAV has also been completed.Experiments and performance analysis suggest that GSDF is a ROS-compatible,efficient and scalable software development framework which is appropriate for swarm robotics system.