Integrated Mission Planning for Distributed Robot Systems (IMPERA)
The main goal of this research project is to support resources virtualization for industrial distributed real-time systems to use the system resources efficiently and decrease the cost and energy consumption of such systems, i.e., ensuring both high performance and timing predictability. The project is targeting software systems inherent in the automation and mining machinery application domains. The Data Distribution Service (DDS) technology is gaining a lot of attention from both industry and academia as it provides a means to virtualize network communications for distributed real time systems. The project intends to develop a mathematical model that captures the real time behavior of applications that use DDS based on statistical analysis. This model will be used to optimally configure the communication among distributed applications given their real time requirements.The research project IMPERA analyses strategies for distributed mission- and task-planning for extraterrestrial missions. An example is the exploration of an unknown lunar environment by a team of mobile robots. Planning is done in the context of mobile and distributed robot systems, which may be heterogeneous and allow for high-level planning. IMPERA aims at a standard modular planning architecture using a software framework, which runs integrated and distributed on multiple robot systems.
The Distributed System research group focuses in the project IMPERA on the theoretical foundations of a computational language to describe missions. On this basis a planning system will be developed, which copes with limited resources, such as energy, and different heterogeneous skills. The core areas of the project can be classified as follows:
•Coordination strategy
•Spatial Reasoning for teams of robots
•Planning-architecture
Partner
DFKI RIC Bremen
OpenSplice DDS is being utilized by the project in the following way. The team of robots start to explore an unknown lunar environment. The collected data will be shared over DDS. It is possible that members of the team lose the connection to other teammates while exploring. Therefore, DDS guarantees that we do not lose any collect information. Finally, the team will search for interessting soil samples and transport them back to the control center.