ChoiRbot: A ROS 2 Toolbox for Cooperative Robotics
This provides a practical tool for researchers and engineers working on distributed robotics, though it is incremental as it builds on existing ROS 2 and distributed control methods.
The authors introduced ChoiRbot, a ROS 2 toolbox for distributed cooperative robotics, enabling complex multi-robot tasks in simulation or experiments with heterogeneous robots without central coordination, and demonstrated its potential through simulations and experiments on mobile ground robots.
In this paper, we introduce ChoiRbot, a toolbox for distributed cooperative robotics based on the novel Robot Operating System (ROS) 2. ChoiRbot provides a fully-functional toolset to execute complex distributed multi-robot tasks, either in simulation or experimentally, with a particular focus on networks of heterogeneous robots without a central coordinator. Thanks to its modular structure, ChoiRbot allows for a highly straight implementation of optimization-based distributed control schemes, such as distributed optimal control, model predictive control, task assignment, in which local computation and communication with neighboring robots are alternated. To this end, the toolbox provides functionalities for the solution of distributed optimization problems. The package can be also used to implement distributed feedback laws that do not need optimization features but do require the exchange of information among robots. The potential of the toolbox is illustrated with simulations and experiments on distributed robotics scenarios with mobile ground robots. The ChoiRbot toolbox is available at https://github.com/OPT4SMART/choirbot.