SO-MRS: a multi-robot system architecture based on the SOA paradigm and ontology

TL;DR

This paper introduces SO-MRS, a flexible multi-robot system architecture based on Service Oriented Architecture and ontology, enabling dynamic composition, discovery, and execution of robot capabilities for complex tasks.

Contribution

It presents a novel multi-robot system architecture that supports heterogeneity and openness using SOA principles and a shared environment ontology.

Findings

Supports dynamic addition/removal of robots without system disruption

Provides protocols for service discovery, composition, execution, and recovery

Demonstrates a multi-agent platform based on the proposed architecture

Abstract

A generic architecture for a class of distributed robotic systems is presented. The architecture supports openness and heterogeneity, i.e. heterogeneous components may be joined and removed from the systems without affecting its basic functionality. The architecture is based on the paradigm of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), and a generic representation (ontology) of the environment. A device (e.g. robot) is seen as a collection of its capabilities exposed as services. Generic protocols for publishing, discovering, arranging services are proposed for creating composite services that can accomplish complex tasks in an automatic way. Also generic protocols for execution of composite services are proposed along with simple protocols for monitoring the executions, and for recovery from failures. A software platform built on a multi-robot system (according to the proposed architecture) is a multi-agent system.