Full Stack Swarm Architecture

Abstract

Robot swarms are homogeneous multi-robot systems that form collective behaviour from decentralized local interactions. Swarms are a favorable choice for solving various problems in robotics as they are robust and fault tolerant in nature, the individual swarm agents themselves being cost effective alternatives to the solution. Developing swarm technology aids in large scale data collection and environmental exploration, package delivery, warehouse management, military reconnaissance, and search and rescue. With the growing interest in developing swarm systems, much researcher and developer time is spent migrating, integrating, and coordinating these various swarm solutions that become deprecated and isolated from the community in frequent cycle. Furthermore, despite the afore- mentioned swarm architectures provided insights into specific design considerations, there still lacks a generalized architecture that outlines a full swarm pipeline, and is modular enough in design to be readily interchanged with new components as both research and industry advance. We present an architecture for developing full stack swarm systems. Such a system must allow for easy design, deployment, interaction, and evaluation. Using our proposed architecture, we then implemented a framework titled: CMUSWARM, on the ROS platform using Gazebo with irobot create for simulation. We then conduct an evaluation of our architecture by comparing two simple swarm control-laws within the framework.

Publication
In RISS 2017 Working Papers Journal
Date