Modular software architecture for teams of cooperating, heterogeneous robots

For teams of cooperating autonomous lightweight robots with challenging dynamical locomotion properties a platform independent modular software architecture and platform independent modules for sensor data processing, planning and motion control have been developed. The software architecture allows high level communication between modules on different abstraction levels of the control architecture within one robot system as well as communication between different and heterogeneous robots and computers using wireless network. Very different behavior control paradigms may be realized on the basis of the developed architecture. The application to teams of cooperating small and medium size humanoid robots is investigated in this paper. Scenarios for inter robot communication and cooperative task accomplishment are described.