Scalability and schedulability in large, coordinated, distributed robot systems

— Multiple, independent robot platforms promise significant advantage with respect to robustness and flexibility. However, coordination between otherwise independent robots requires the exchange of information; either implicitly (as in gestural communication), or explicitly (as in message passing in a communication network.) In either case, control processes resident on all coordinated peers must participate in the collective behavior. This paper evaluates the potential to scale such a coupled control framework to many participating individuals, where scalability is evaluated in terms of the schedulability of coupled, distributed control processes. We examine how schedulability affects the scalability of a robot system, and discuss an algorithm used for offline schedulability analysis of a distributed task model. We present a distributed coordinated search task and analyze the schedulability of the designed task structure. We are able to analyze communication delays in the system t...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: ICRA
• Authors: John Sweeney, Huan Li, Roderic A. Grupen, Krithi Ramamritham
• Keywords: ICRA 2003, Independent Robots, Offline Schedulability Analysis, Robotics, Schedulability Analysis