Long-term deployment of a fleet of mobile robots requires reliable and secure two-way communication channels between individual robots and remote human operators for supervision and tasking. Existing open-source solutions to this problem degrade in performance in challenging real-world situations such as intermittent and low-bandwidth connectivity, do not provide security control options, and can be computationally expensive on hardware-constrained mobile robot platforms. In this paper, we present Robofleet, a lightweight open-source system which provides inter-robot communication, remote monitoring, and remote tasking for a fleet of ROS-enabled service-mobile robots that is designed with the practical goals of resilience to network variance and security control in mind.
Robofleet supports multi-user, multi-robot communication via a central server. This architecture deduplicates network traffic between robots, significantly reducing overall network load when compared with native ROS communication. This server also functions as a single entrypoint into the system, enabling security control and user authentication. Individual robots run the lightweight Robofleet client, which is responsible for exchanging messages with the Robofleet server. It automatically adapts to adverse network conditions through backpressure monitoring as well as topic-level priority control, ensuring that safety-critical messages are successfully transmitted. Finally, the system includes a web-based visualization tool that can be run on any internet-connected, browser-enabled device to monitor and control the fleet.
We compare Robofleet to existing methods of robotic communication, and demonstrate that it provides superior resilience to network variance while maintaining performance that exceeds that of widely-used systems.
Routing and Scheduling Optimization for Urban Air Mobility Fleet Management using Quantum Annealing
Graduate School of Information Sciences, Tohoku University（东北大学信息科学研究科）；Sigma-i Co., Ltd.（Sigma-i 公司）；Sumitomo Corporation（住友商事）；Department of Physics, Tokyo Institute of Technology（东京工业大学物理系）
Universitat Politècnica de València（瓦伦西亚理工大学）；Instituto Tecnológico de Informática (ITI)（信息技术研究所）；Instituto de Automática e Informática Industrial（自动化与工业信息研究所）
