REUSABLE ARCHITECTURE AND TOOLS FOR TEAMS OF LIGHTWEIGHT HETEROGENEOUS ROBOTS

The software framework RoboFrame has been designed to meet the special requirements for teams of lightweight autonomous heterogeneous robot systems. Due to platform abstraction and modern object oriented design, it allows the reuse of components of common robot control software. It can also efficiently be implemented on new platforms and enables different control architectures for different tasks. For the exemplary application in autonomous robot soccer teams configurable and portable algorithms for vision, world modeling, behavior and motion control have been developed on top of the framework. For debugging, controlling and monitoring, an extendable graphical user interface and a generic simulator package have been implemented around the framework. Based on these instruments, different applications for homogeneous and heterogeneous robot teams can be realized in short time.