Enabling World Information Exchange in a Heterogeneous Team of Robots for Mobile Manipulation

Kurzfassung

Exchanging information about the world among robots is fundamental for them to cooperate. However, challenges still persist when the robots exhibit heterogeneity in their hardware/software components, and different tasks such as observing and interacting with the environment are given to them. In this paper, we propose a new communication architecture and describe how it addressed these challenges with our team of heterogeneous robots developed for and demonstrated during the four-week Moon-analogue exploration mission on Mt. Etna, Italy. Our approach is to make each robot have its egocentric world model and exchange information only by remotely accessing the interfaces of other robots' world model. We offer key findings on the different communication strategies to trigger the remote interfaces as well as insights into how these information exchanges could compose a complex conversation. Through in-depth analyses of the real-world demonstration, we evaluate the contribution of such a communication design, and derive general design guidelines for information exchange about the world between robots in heterogeneous multi-robot systems.