ALLIANCE-ROS: A Software Framework on ROS for Fault-Tolerant and Cooperative Mobile Robots

Programming control systems for mobile robots is complicated and time-consuming, due to three aspects, i.e., the robot behavior coordination, the distributed multi-robot cooperation and the robot software reusability. Subsumption model is a robust control architecture for mobile robots. ALLIANCE model extends it to multirobot systems, which is a fully distributed, fault-tolerant model. Robot operating system (ROS) provides a lot of reusable robot modules. By combining the above three, we propose a software framework named ALLIANCE-ROS for developing fault-tolerant cooperative multi-robot systems with abundant software resources available. We encapsulate the ROS facilities to build the framework prototype. We also use some high-performance plugin-based mechanism to optimize the bottom of the framework. One may use the framework-provided API conveniently to construct single-robot and multi-robot applications with all ROS resources available. This work is demonstrated by three application cases including an autonomous roving robot, a security patrol robot and multiple patrol robots. They are constructed and tested in both the simulated and the real environment. The experimental results validate the usability and availability of ALLIANCE-ROS.