An Environment for Programming and Control of Multi-Robot Manipulators

This paper discusses the development of an open architecture multi-robot system. The environment consists of five serial-link robot manipulators in the ECE robotics laboratory at the University of Western Ontario, Canada. The robots are operated under their original controllers which are connected together through a network of supervisory computers. A preemptive multi-tasking real time operating system (RTOS) running on these computers is used to perform supervisory and cooperative tasks involving multiple robots. The software environment allows for controlling the motion of one or more robots and their interaction with other devices. Development of modular components is discussed in this paper along with typical laboratory procedures with a link to a short video demonstration for a multi-robot object handling task. The environment is used to train undergraduate and graduate students on how to develop software for various robotic applications, including scheduling techniques, cooperative manipulation, collision avoidance, and emerging robotic applications