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TECHNOLOGY AND CODE article

Front. Robot. AI
Sec. Computational Intelligence in Robotics
Volume 11 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/frobt.2024.1363041
This article is part of the Research Topic Robotics Software Engineering View all 4 articles

Software patterns and data structures for runtime coordination of robots, with a focus on realtime execution performance

Provisionally accepted
María I. Artigas María I. Artigas 1,2*Rômulo T. Rodrigues Rômulo T. Rodrigues 1,2Lars Vanderseypen Lars Vanderseypen 1Herman Bruyninckx Herman Bruyninckx 1,2,3
  • 1 Department of Mechanical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering Sciences, KU Leuven, Heverlee (Leuven), Belgium
  • 2 flanders make, Leuven, Belgium
  • 3 Department of Mechanical Engineering, Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, Netherlands

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    This paper introduces software patterns (registration, acquire-release, cache awareness) and data structures (Petri net, Finite State Machine, protocol flag array) to support the coordinated execution of software activities (also called "components" or "agents"). Moreover, it presents and tests an implementation for Petri nets which supports realtime execution in shared memory for deployment inside one individual robot, and separates event firing and handling to allow also distributed deployment between multiple robots. Experimental validation of the introduced patterns and data structures is performed within the context of activities for task execution, control and perception and decision making, for an application on coordinated navigation.

    Keywords: multi-robot, coordination, Petri net, finite state machine, Realtime, Shared memory

    Received: 29 Dec 2023; Accepted: 12 Aug 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Artigas, Rodrigues, Vanderseypen and Bruyninckx. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: María I. Artigas, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering Sciences, KU Leuven, Heverlee (Leuven), Belgium

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.