A software system for collaborative robotics applications and its application in particle swarm optimization implementations

This paper presents a particle swarm optimization (PSO)-inspired multi-robot search application based on an innovative software system for collaborative robotic applications. The system has a multi-layer architecture which provides low- and high-level interfaces to the robots, resource (robots) management, security policies and concurrent robot access. The main result is the successful testing of the PSO-inspired algorithm on real-world experiments, using Khepera III and e-puck robots. Simulated results obtained in other studies are therefore validated by the real-world experiments. Differences between simulation and real-world experiments are presented and discussed critically.