A CORBA-based cooperative mobile robot system

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to present a distributed multiple mobile robot system that provides a collaborative control and simulation environment. Design/methodology/approach - A CORBA-based cooperative system is designed to implement a robotic layered cooperative mechanism. The mechanism has three layers: mission, transport and execution. In order to realize a flexible and effective communication in the cooperative mechanism, an extended robot event service (federated event service) is proposed to improve the cooperative system's real time performance. Findings - Experimentation has proved the validity and effectiveness of the system. The federated event service's latency is approximately 9 percent less than the standard event service latency when the CPU is determined. Practical implications - The robotic modularized system includes the map-building, path-planning, robot task-planning, simulation and actual robot control function modules, and uses CORBA to integrate the whole system. It is easy to implement a layered cooperative mechanism for multiple mobile robots. Given the problem on multiple robots cooperation latency, a useful extended robot event service is proposed. Originality/value - The paper focuses on the distributed functional modular architecture, and the multiple robots cooperative layered mechanism. In the mechanism, an extended robot event service (federated event service) is proposed to reduce the cooperative system's real time latency. The conducted experiment validates the proposed system with a good performance for multiple mobile robots' cooperation.