Abstract

The Simulation-Based Control (SBC) approach and the Task-Oriented Control (TOC) development, which have already been investigated for individual articulated robots, is extended to teams of articulated robots, hereinafter also referred to as Multi-Robot System (MRS).
The basics of SBC, TOC and client-server approach for vendor-independent robot programming are introduced. Possible interactions in an MRS are then analyzed and classified, and a TOC description of interactions is developed. The TOC description is based on reusable, atomic tasks that can be aggregated sequentially and hierarchically via interfaces.
For three interaction classes, the TOC specification and its transformation into executable robot commands using a client-server based robot midleware is discussed. The control dynamics is described with the Discrete Event System Specification (DEVS) and represented using DEVS diagrams.