DSAAR: distributed software architecture for autonomous robots

This dissertation presents a software architecture called the Distributed Software Architecture for Autonomous Robots (DSAAR), which is designed to provide the fast development and prototyping of multi-robot systems. The DSAAR building blocks allow engineers to focus on the behavioural model of robots and collectives. This architecture is of special interest in domains where several human, robot, and software agents have to interact continuously. Thus, fast prototyping and reusability is a must. DSAAR tries to cope with these requirements towards an advanced solution to the n-humans and m-robots problem with a set of design good practices and development tools. This dissertation will also focus on Human-Robot Interaction, mainly on the subject of teleoperation. In teleoperation human judgement is an integral part of the process, heavily influenced by the telemetry data received from the remote environment. So the speed in which commands are given and the telemetry data is received, is of crucial importance. Using the DSAAR architecture a teleoperation approach is proposed. This approach was designed to provide all entities present in the network a shared reality, where every entity is an information source in an approach similar to the distributed blackboard. This solution was designed to accomplish a real time response, as well as, the completest perception of the robots’ surroundings. Experimental results obtained with the physical robot suggest that the system is able to guarantee a close interaction between users and robot.