ROCI: a distributed framework for multi-robot perception and control

This paper presents ROCI, a framework for developing applications for multi-robot teams. In ROCI, each robot is considered a node which contains several modules and may export different types of services and capabilities to other nodes. Each node runs a kernel that mediates the interactions of the robots in a team. This kernel keeps an updated database of all nodes and the functionalities that they export. Multi-robot applications can be built and changed dynamically, connecting modules that may be running in different nodes over the network. As an example, we present an obstacle avoidance task implemented using our framework and also discuss the use of ROCI in a multi-robot scenario.