Control Architecture Design of Mobile Printer System based on Multi-robot Cooperation

This paper proposes a novel control architecture for mobile printer system based on multi-robot cooperation. Mobile printer system consists of 3 omnidirectional robots, wireless LAN system, graphic user interface(GUI) and one host computer. If users draw a picture in GUI, a host computer commands client robots to reproduce it by drawing the same in very short time. To minimize elapsed time in drawing all lines, control architecture I, II are proposed. In multi-robot control architecture I, the robots are made to seek for the nearest line and to draw it, repeating this process until all lines are drawn. In multi-robot control architecture II, the client robots are fed with the line look-up table from the host computer and are made to draw lines allocated to each of them. Control architecture I is a decentralized system based on behavior-based robotics. In this architecture, no planning is needed and mobile printer system has fault tolerance. On the contrary, control architecture II are centralized systems based on evolutionary programming. In this architecture, a host computer finds time-optimal paths of all robots by EP and send them to all robots. The proposed architectures were simulated and real experiments were conducted. The results demonstrate the effectiveness and applicability of the proposed control architectures.