Communication and Collaboration in Heterogeneous Teams of Soccer Robots

Download or read book Communication and Collaboration in Heterogeneous Teams of Soccer Robots written by Philipp A. Baer and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Because of the lack of standard software, which prompts every RoboCup team to develop its own software framework, heterogeneity issues play a decisive role. They cause several problems when establishing a mixed-team of soccer robots involving different hardware and software platforms. In order to cope with theses issues, we presented SPICA, a development environment for communication and collaboration infrastructures for heterogeneous teams of soccer robots. In SPICA, we have adopted a model-driven development approach which is naturally very appropriate to cope with heterogeneity. One of its basic paradigms is the platformindependent specification of software allowing automatic generation of source code for different platforms. Accordingly, SPICA provides a modelling language and tools facilitating the specification of communication and collaboration infrastructures as well as the automatic transformation of the resulting models into source code. The SPICA modelling language consists of three domain-specific sublanguages, which are tailored to different aspects of the infrastructure. The MDL allows the specification of messages and containers along with their representations. The DFDL provides specification means for module stubs, the data flow between them, and for their data management capabilities. In order to allow a flexible filtering of data and to support the creation of a cooperative world model, the DADL was developed. It is a general purpose language for calculations on the exchanged data and also provides some predefined patterns for data fusion. As illustrated in a detailed example, the development effort for a team-play in heterogeneous teams of soccer robots can be reduced significantly with the help of SPICA. The generated source code can be integrated into the existing software framework very easily and with very little effort. However, as already mentioned above, the development of SPICA is still work in progress. In particular, this is true for the DADL and the corresponding transformation support. Appropriate support for code generation is available only for a subset of the predefined data-fusion patterns at the moment and only a basic set of predefined functions is integrated into the language. In the future, we will enhance the language and the corresponding code generation tools with regard to especially these issues. We also aim at integrating support for defining functions and calling functions from external libraries. Besides, as not only the programming of a complex communication infrastructure is a challenging task, but also its configuration, we try to include support for self-configuration of the generated infrastructures into the SPICA environment. However, we are quite confident that with the SPICA development framework one important step was made towards the realization of cooperative team organization. It is our vision that teams provide and publish descriptions of the messages and corresponding data.