Stefan Herbrechtsmeier

A Robot Swarm assisting a Human Fire Fighter

Emergencies in industrial warehouses are a major concern for fire-fighters. The large dimensions, together with the development of dense smoke that drastically reduces visibility, represent major challenges. The GUARDIANS robot swarm is designed to assist fire-fighters in searching a large warehouse. In this paper we discuss the technology developed for a swarm of robots assisting fire-fighters. We explain the swarming algorithms that provide the functionality by which the robots react to and follow humans while no communication is required. Next we discuss the wireless communication system, which is a so-called mobile ad-hoc network. The communication network provides also the means to locate the robots and humans. Thus, the robot swarm is able to provide guidance information to the humans. Together with the fire-fighters we explored how the robot swarm should feed information back to the human fire-fighter. We have designed and experimented with interfaces for presenting swarm-based information to human beings.

BeBot: A Modular Mobile Miniature Robot Platform Supporting Hardware Reconfiguration and Multi-standard Communication

Mobile robots become more and more important in current research and education. Especially small ’on the table’ experiments attract interest, because they need no additional or special laboratory equipments. In this context platforms are desirable which are small, simple to access and relatively easy to program. An additional powerful information processing unit is advantageous to simplify the implementation of algorithm and the porting of software from desktop computers to the robot platform. In this paper we present a new versatile miniature robot that can be ideally used for research and education. The small size of the robot of about 9 cm edge length, its robust drive and its modular structure make the robot a general device for single and multi-robot experiments executed ’on the table’. For programming and evaluation the robot can be wirelessly connected via Bluetooth or WiFi. The operating system of the robot is based on the standard Linux kernel and the GNU C standard library. A player/stage model eases software development and testing.

Applying dynamic reconfiguration in the mobile robotics domain: A case study on computer vision algorithms

Mobile robots are widely used in industrial environments and are expected to be widely available in human environments in the near future, for example, in the area of care and service robots. This article proposes an implementation for a highly customizable color recognition module based on Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) hardware to accomplish tasks like real-time frame processing for image streams. In comparison to a pure software solution on a CPU, an attached FPGA-based hardware accelerator enables real-time image processing and significantly reduces the required computing power of the CPU. Instead, the CPU can be used for tasks that cannot be efficiently implemented on FPGAs, for example, because of a large control overhead. We concentrate on a multirobot scenario where a group of robots follows a human team member by keeping a specific formation in order to support the human in exploration and object detection. Additionally, the robots provide a communication infrastructure to maintain a stable multihop communication network between the human and a base station recording all actions and evaluating the captured images and transmitted data. Depending on the current operating conditions, the robot system has to be able to execute a wide variety of different tasks. Since only a small number of tasks have to be executed concurrently, dynamic reconfiguration of the FPGA can be used to avoid the parallel implementation of all tasks on the FPGA. Within this context, this article discusses application fields where dynamic reconfiguration of FPGA-based coprocessors significantly reduces the CPU load and presents examples of how dynamic reconfiguration can be used in exploration.

AMiRo – Autonomous Mini Robot for Research and Education

This paper describes the motivation, system architecture and design details of a mini robot for research and education. The main objective is to produce a set of electronic modules for sensor processing, actuator control and cognitive processing that fully utilise currently available electronics technology for the construction of mini robots capable of rich autonomous behaviours. These modules are used for the two wheeled AMiRo mini robot that meets the size requirements for participation in the AMiRESoT robot soccer league. All mechanical parts for the robot are off-the-shelf components or can be fabricated with common drilling, turning and milling machines. The connection between the modules is well defined and supports standard interfaces from parallel camera capture interfaces down to simple serial interfaces.

Miniature robot BeBot: Mechatronic test platform for self-x properties

Machines are omnipresent. They produce, they transport. Machines facilitate work and assist. The increasing penetration of mechanical engineering by information technology enables considerable benefits. We refer to such systems as advanced mechatronic systems, which relay on the close interaction of mechanics, electric/electronics, control engineering and software engineering. Hence, the design and production of such systems is an interdisciplinary and complex task. Our ambition is a new school for the design of advanced mechatronic systems. Consequently, we need an avant-garde basic system which can be used to develop and to test future applications. The miniature robot BeBot is such a basic system. This robot constitutes the test bench for the applications, being based on modern approaches, such as self-optimization, self-organization and self-coordination as well as on the use of new manufacturing technologies.

Demonstrating self-optimization using a heterogeneous robot group

Self-optimization is a concept for mechatronic systems to leave open the choice among system objectives as a degree of freedom until runtime to allow better adaptation to changing system and environment conditions. Demonstration and knowledge transfer of the concept is not easy as the effects of it in mechatronic systems are hard to see in a complex system. To further spread the idea of self-optimization, an intuitive anchor is needed to make it easier to talk about the concept. Also the abstraction from technical details facilitates focusing on the concept. We have developed a multi-agent heterogeneous robotic demonstrator that allows showing the process of self-optimization on a timescale of minutes. The demonstrator decomposes the roles in a mechatronic system to robotic agents. An association between a function and the behavior of the robot is achieved. After having demonstrated the setup for expert and non-expert audiences we have seen the encouraging effect that discussions spin off easily and allow to spread the idea effectively. We present the concept of self-optimization, the behavior-based demonstrator scenario implemented using BeBot miniature and Paderkicker robots in an office environment.

AMiRo: A modular & customizable open-source mini robot platform

AMiRo is a novel modular robot platform that can be easily extended and customized in hardware and software. Built up of electronic modules that fully exploit recent technology and open-source software for sensor processing, actuator control, and cognitive processing, the robot facilitates rich autonomous behaviors. Further contribution lies in the completely open-source software habitat: from low-level microcontroller implementations, over high-level applications running on an embedded processor, up to hardware accelerated algorithms using programmable logic. This paper describes in detail the motivation, system architecture, and software design of the AMiRo, which surpasses state-of-the-art competitors.

Mobile ad-hoc networking supporting multi-hop connections in multi-robot scenarios

Abstract: One of the most promising applications of a multi-robot system is to assist humans in urban search and rescue (USAR) scenarios in the aftermath of natural or man-made disasters. The main disaster scenario covered by our system is a large industrial warehouse on fire, described in the GUARDIANS project funded by the European Union 6th Framework Program (project no: 045269). As described by South Yorkshire fire department (SY-Fire), which is a partner and main client of the project, fire can occur in large warehouses with dimensions over 100 by 100 square meters. In this scenario, black smoke may fill a large space of the warehouse making it very difficult for the fire fighters to orientate with the building, locate victims or find their way out and exit the building. In this chapter we describe our work and achievements regarding one main work package in the GUARDIANS project, focusing on two key arts: the ad-hoc network communication system, and communicative and non-communicative swarming behaviours. Several attempts were made to develop new topology control algorithms or modify the existing ones to best suit the required ad-hoc scenario. By investigating several techniques, we finally proposed a hierarchal cellular protocol inheriting some of its features from pro-active and hybrid hierarchical protocols like cluster-head gateway switch routing (CGSR)1 and hierarchical state routing (HSR).2 A special communication platform is used for implementing our communication protocol. This so called mobile communication gateway will be optimized for mobile usage and therefore will support different techniques for energy saving. Some of these techniques are dynamic frequents and voltage scaling as well as dynamic power down of non-used hardware components. Three communication standards are supported by this hardware platform: wireless local area network (WLAN), Bluetooth and Zigbee, and the first two standards are used for our project.

AMiRESot – A New Robot Soccer League with Autonomous Miniature Robots

AMiRESot is a new robot soccer league that is played with small autonomous miniature robots. Team sizes are defined with one, two, and three robots per team. Special to the AMiRESot league are the fully autonomous behavior of the robots and their small size. For the matches, the rules mainly follow the FIFA laws with some modifications being useful for robot soccer. The new AMiRESot soccer robot is small in size (maximum 110 mm diameter) but a powerful vehicle, equipped with a differential drive system. For sensing, the robots in their basic configuration are equipped with active infrared sensors and a color image sensor. For information processing a powerful mobile processor and reconfigurable hardware resources (FPGA) are available. Due to the robot’s modular structure it can be easily extended by additional sensing and processing resources. This paper gives an overview of the AMiRESot rules and presents details of the new robot platform used for AMiRESot.

AMiRo: A Mini Robot for Scientific Applications

The Autonomous Mini Robot (AMiRo) is a modular and extensible mini robot platform, designed for scientific research and education. Its decentralized architecture enables to easily add or remove functionalities as required for any application. A well defined physical and electrical interface offers the possibility to design new modules with minimal effort. The open-source software framework for the AMiRo is already growing, since the robot is commonly used for research, education, and competitions. Several demonstrations of the system are given, which present its capabilities. Starting with a fuzzy controller for line following, these demonstrations include remote controlling as well as an implementation of an artificial neural network running on the platform.