Distributed Architecture for Mobile Robots

The present work originates from the context of the RoboCup project at the Institute of Parallel and Distributed Systems at the University of Stuttgart. The RoboCup project is a world-wide research and education initiative with the goal of developing autonomous humanoid robots which are able to play soccer against humans. In the so-called middle-size league compete up to 6 robots per team with a maximum size of 50cm x 50cm on a 8m x 12m field. In order to limit the complexity of the scenario, the environment is provided with pre-defined colors, e.g., red ball.

The main purpose of this thesis is to design a distributed software architecture for the microprocessor based mother boards of mobile robots with distributed control systems. The proposed software architecture, which in this thesis will be referred to as BVCoPS architecture, follows the concepts of distributed control architectures, e.g., modularity and inter-component communication. BVCoPS provides a uniform structure for the task specific software modules, which are considered as the contructing elements of computer software of a mobile robot, and provides a mechanism for data communication between the modules. The computer programs developed based on a BVCoPS architecture are proper for integration in distributed control systems of mobile robots.