Feasibility study of IoRT platform "Big Sensor Box"

This paper proposes new software and hardware platforms named ROS-TMS and Big Sensor Box, respectively, for an informationally structured environment. We started the development of a management system for an informationally structured environment named Town Management System (TMS) in the Robot Town Project in 2005. Since then we have been continuing our efforts to improve performance and to enhance TMS functions. Recently, we launched a new version of TMS named ROS-TMS, which resolves some critical problems in TMS by adopting the Robot Operating System (ROS) and utilizing the high scalability and numerous resources of ROS. In this paper, we first discuss the structure of a software platform for the informationally structured environment and describe in detail our latest system, ROS-TMS version 4.0. Next, we introduce a hardware platform for the informationally structured environment named Big Sensor Box, in which a variety of sensors are embedded and service robots are operated according to the structured information under the management of ROS-TMS. Robot service experiments including a fetch-andgive task and autonomous control of a wheelchair robot are also conducted in Big Sensor Box.