Development of CAMPOUT and its further applications to planetary rover operations: a multi-robot control architecture

In this paper, we describe an architecture for the development of autonomy software for multi-robot distributed control and collective estimation. CAMPOUT, the Control Architecture for Multi-Robot Planetary OUTposts, provides communication facilities for sharing of state information across robots and it uses a behavior network for representation and execution of group activities as well as the activities of a single robot. In our research, we have shown that CAMPOUT provides a level of abstraction that enables us to develop multi-robot software in a manner much similar to what we use for single robot software development. We showcase the main architectural components by describing two multi-robot tasks for planetary construction and collective cliff-descent. For both tasks, we show how behavior networks can be used to describe group activities and how publish/subscribe and other communication mechanisms can be used to share state information across multiple robots.