We have been working at a multi robot coordination project here at Carnegie Mellon. The framework is completely ROS based right from the robot controller to communication, front end and task allocation. While starting this project I was unable to find ROS packages catering to coordination among multiple robots. An important note here is that each robot runs its own master since we assume a failure prone network. Anyways we thought we would release some of the software we wrote that could help someone else wanting to run multi-robot systems as well. Since we are in the process of packaging and cleaning (its a university project so we really need to clean it!) our code I would like to get some suggestions on what you would desire in a Multi-Robot package. Anything from vague ideas to specific implementations is welcome.
Just a brief and high level description: There are 4 packages:
1) Communication package - currently using UDP however we may switch to ZeroMQ. Any input on protocol is appreciated. This package will handle transmitting topics of interest to other robots on a strictly request-respond basis. This scheme worked well for us in the work we did. Currently the comms can transmit Map, Pose, tf, Task (which is a goto Pose), Laser Scans, Camera Image. These topics were relevant to our work so we would appreciate inputs on other topics that might be useful communicating to other robots. One can either query another robot for any of these or request to transmit its own information. Additionally it can serve as a proxy for another robot.
2) Robot Specific Pkg - This provides high level implementation of basic Robot capabilities. Planning, Occupancy Mapping, Task Execution (move base Action client), & Costing.
3) Front End: Visualizes the map, pose etc from multiple robots. Additionally it can manually control, assign tasks to individual robots or to the swarm.
4) Task Allocation: We used a proprietary market based allocation system to handle task management. Unfortunately we cannot publish that. However if you have suggestions on task management systems we might be able to port some of it in this package.
Sorry for the long post. We would really appreciate suggestions, concerns and comments in this multi-robot framework. I have read some discussion in the multimaster package. The work we have is more narrow and focussed on inter-robot coordination as compared to the overarching multimaster package. However we would love to contribute in whichever small way we can by putting out some work we did if it can help.
Thanks,
Ammar
Hi Ammar,
I’m curious – are you working with Manuela Veloso? She was my PhD advisor when I was at the CMU/RI :-)
At a high level, I would strongly encourage integrating your stuff into http://ros.org/wiki/multi_master_fkie , which looks like the most fully-featured multi-master stuff I’ve seen so far. Hopefully this will lead to a de-facto standard, which is what the community really needs to move forward in this regard (in contrast, right now there are probably 10+ ad-hoc partial implementations for multirobot stuff running around in the wild, none of which work together).
I’d say the same thing for the market-based planner… if you can expose all the ROS msgs/srvs and design pattern, then anyone can instantiate the logic for the coordination routine. I don’t know who all has multirobot planners as ROS pkgs currently (there’s http://sourceforge.net/p/fmrp/code , maybe more), but I’d do a quick google search to see if there’s someone with similar enough stuff that it would make sense for you to re-use/reinforce their existing structure.
Cheers! Looking forward to a great CMU multi-robot package!
-Nick
Hello Community,We have been working at a multi robot coordination project here at Carnegie Mellon. The framework is completely ROS based right from the robot controller to communication, front end and task allocation. While starting this project I was unable to find ROS packages catering to coordination among multiple robots. An important note here is that each robot runs its own master since we assume a failure prone network. Anyways we thought we would release some of the software we wrote that could help someone else wanting to run multi-robot systems as well. Since we are in the process of packaging and cleaning (its a university project so we really need to clean it!) our code I would like to get some suggestions on what you would desire in a Multi-Robot package. Anything from vague ideas to specific implementations is welcome.
Just a brief and high level description: There are 4 packages:
1) Communication package - currently using UDP however we may switch to ZeroMQ. Any input on protocol is appreciated. This package will handle transmitting topics of interest to other robots on a strictly request-respond basis. This scheme worked well for us in the work we did. Currently the comms can transmit Map, Pose, tf, Task (which is a goto Pose), Laser Scans, Camera Image. These topics were relevant to our work so we would appreciate inputs on other topics that might be useful communicating to other robots. One can either query another robot for any of these or request to transmit its own information. Additionally it can serve as a proxy for another robot.
2) Robot Specific Pkg - This provides high level implementation of basic Robot capabilities. Planning, Occupancy Mapping, Task Execution (move base Action client), & Costing.
3) Front End: Visualizes the map, pose etc from multiple robots. Additionally it can manually control, assign tasks to individual robots or to the swarm.
4) Task Allocation: We used a proprietary market based allocation system to handle task management. Unfortunately we cannot publish that. However if you have suggestions on task management systems we might be able to port some of it in this package.
Sorry for the long post. We would really appreciate suggestions, concerns and comments in this multi-robot framework. I have read some discussion in the multimaster package. The work we have is more narrow and focussed on inter-robot coordination as compared to the overarching multimaster package. However we would love to contribute in whichever small way we can by putting out some work we did if it can help.
Hi Daniel,
> Nick, would you like to get together sometime?
I’d be happy to get together! If you recall, we spoke a bit at ROSCon, but didn’t get much 1-on-1 time. But aren’t you in Australia or Korea or something? I’m in Boston.
> I've been parsing your code
Are you sure that was my code? The fkie stuff is from someone else… We have written multi-master solutions and tf compression and multi-channel comms and quality-of-service, but it is nigh impossible for us to release any of it.
Anyway, let me know if it is still desirable/feasible to chat.
Cheers,
-Nick