A new ROS-based hybrid architecture for heterogeneous multi-robot systems

In this paper, a new hybrid architecture for heterogeneous multi-robot systems is presented. Personal computers as central server and embedded systems as nodes are integrated in this architecture based on robot operating system. The complex computation and visualization are processed on server, while real-time tasks are completed in robot nodes with embedded systems. Compared with the existing schemes, this hybrid architecture can keep a good balance between flexibility, expansibility, power consumption and real-time capability, without causing degradation in performance. According to the architecture, a low-cost and high-performance robot node named hybrid real-time mobile robot platform is implemented on system-on-chip. The experimental result of multi-robot following verifies the feasibility and usability of the proposed scheme.