SO-MRS: a multi-robot system architecture based on the SOA paradigm and ontology
This work addresses the problem of system integration and adaptability in multi-robot systems, offering a generic solution that is incremental in applying SOA and ontology to robotics.
The authors tackled the challenge of creating a flexible, open architecture for distributed robotic systems by proposing SO-MRS, which uses Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and ontology to allow heterogeneous components to join or leave without disrupting functionality, enabling automatic composition and execution of complex tasks.
A generic architecture for a class of distributed robotic systems is presented. The architecture supports openness and heterogeneity, i.e. heterogeneous components may be joined and removed from the systems without affecting its basic functionality. The architecture is based on the paradigm of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), and a generic representation (ontology) of the environment. A device (e.g. robot) is seen as a collection of its capabilities exposed as services. Generic protocols for publishing, discovering, arranging services are proposed for creating composite services that can accomplish complex tasks in an automatic way. Also generic protocols for execution of composite services are proposed along with simple protocols for monitoring the executions, and for recovery from failures. A software platform built on a multi-robot system (according to the proposed architecture) is a multi-agent system.