Remote-operated robot swarm for measuring an environment

In this paper, we describe a mobile distributed multirobot system and how it is used to measure an environment semiautonomously. The system contains a swarm of robots and a remote user computer for a human operator. The swarm has two kinds of robots; measurement robots and a group coordinator that delegates tasks to each robot. The measurement robots have different kinds of capabilities and sensors. The set of sensors can be changed, and therefore different kinds of measurements can be done remotely. The system is semi autonomous and a human acts as a supervisor. The human operator controls the group's operation by sending higher-level commands and tasks to the group coordinator. The coordinator delegates a task to each robot in the swarm, providing effective operation in the swarm and each individual robot. Each robot does its own task autonomously. To be able to use a system with different kinds of robots with different kinds of capabilities, a dynamic interface is needed. The usage of the Property Service Architecture provides this possibility. The same architecture has already been used in several other systems. This measurement swarm can be a part of a larger system and can interoperate with other services in a distributed system.