Online Reconfiguration of Distributed Robot Control Systems for Modular Robot Behavior Implementation
- PDF / 3,457,697 Bytes
- 26 Pages / 595.224 x 790.955 pts Page_size
- 118 Downloads / 187 Views
Online Reconfiguration of Distributed Robot Control Systems for Modular Robot Behavior Implementation Malte Wirkus1
¨ 1 · Sascha Arnold1 · Elmar Berghofer
Received: 20 December 2019 / Accepted: 7 July 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract The use of autonomous robots in areas that require executing a broad range of different tasks is currently hampered by the high complexity of the software that adapts the robot controller to different situations the robot would face. Current robot software frameworks facilitate implementing controllers for individual tasks with some variability, however, their possibilities for adapting the controllers at runtime are very limited and don’t scale with the requirements of a highly versatile autonomous robot. With the software presented in this paper, the behavior of robots is implemented modularly by composing individual controllers, between which it is possible to switch freely at runtime, since the required transitions are calculated automatically. Thereby the software developer is relieved of the task to manually implement and maintain the transitions between different operational modes of the robot, what largely reduces software complexity for larger amounts of different robot behaviors. The software is realized by a model-based development approach. We will present the metamodels enabling the modeling of the controllers as well as the runtime architecture for the management of the controllers on distributed computation hardware. Furthermore, this paper introduces an algorithm that calculates the transitions between two controllers. A series of technical experiments verifies the choice of the underlying middleware and the performance of online controller reconfiguration. A further experiment demonstrates the applicability of the approach to real robotics applications. Keywords Robot programming · Robot control architectures · Robot autonomy · Model-based development · Model-driven engineering · Robot control
1 Introduction Autonomous robotic systems, that are versatile in their application areas, will at some point face the problem that a change in control policy is needed in order to account for a new situation or task. There can be numerous reasons for a required adaption of the controller. For example; a sensorequipped robot might need to switch its data processing pipeline to make use of different sensing hardware to cope with changes in the environment. The robot also might be confronted with a task requiring interacting with specific objects, which can only be recognized with a certain sensorprocessing algorithm. A further example would be that for a legged system, a change in the ground properties might Malte Wirkus
[email protected] 1
Deutsches Forschungszentrum f¨ur K¨unstliche Intelligenz (DFKI), Robert-Hooke-Str. 1, 28359 Bremen, Germany
require exchanging the gait control subsystem. With an increasing number of possible controller configurations for a robot, also the software complexity of the coordination layer increases when the possible controller transiti
Data Loading...
