DHPC Adelaide

DHPC Technical Report DHPC-114

Distributed Computing for Robotics

K.A.Hawick, H.A.James, R.G.Shepherd and J.E.Story

Archived 4 September 2002.

Abstract

Robotics as a discipline is enjoying new and high levels of popularity due to advances in technological capabilities. The improved affordability of components, robot toys and kits has also contributed to activities in the field. We discuss our ideas for distributed and cooperative robotics systems and review research progress in this area. We first define aspects of distributed robotics and focus on component based hardware and software solutions to problems of cooperative behaviour amongst robots. We consider hardware issues of: mechatronics; wireless communications; and lightweight processing systems. We consider software architecture and component and layer designs and present our ideas for programming and managing a swarm of distributed robot components.

Keywords: distributed computing; robotics; distributed artificial intelligence; mobile computing; ad hoc networks.


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