Kim Min Su, Kim Sang Hyuck, Kang Soon Ju
Department of Software Convergence, Kyungpook National University, 80 Daehakro, Bukgu, Daegu 702-701, Korea.
School of Electronics Engineering, College of IT Engineering, Kyungpook National University, 80 Daehakro, Bukgu, Daegu 702-701, Korea.
Sensors (Basel). 2017 Feb 17;17(2):392. doi: 10.3390/s17020392.
Research on robots that accompany humans is being continuously studied. The Pet-Bot provides walking-assistance and object-carrying services without any specific controls through interaction between the robot and the human in real time. However, with Pet-Bot, there is a limit to the number of robots a user can use. If this limit is overcome, the Pet-Bot can provide services in more areas. Therefore, in this study, we propose a swarm-driving middleware design adopting the concept of a swarm, which provides effective parallel movement to allow multiple human-accompanying robots to accomplish a common purpose. The functions of middleware divide into three parts: a sequence manager for swarm process, a messaging manager, and a relative-location identification manager. This middleware processes the sequence of swarm-process of robots in the swarm through message exchanging using radio frequency (RF) communication of an IEEE 802.15.4 MAC protocol and manages an infrared (IR) communication module identifying relative location with IR signal strength. The swarm in this study is composed of the master interacting with the user and the slaves having no interaction with the user. This composition is intended to control the overall swarm in synchronization with the user activity, which is difficult to predict. We evaluate the accuracy of the relative-location estimation using IR communication, the response time of the slaves to a change in user activity, and the time to organize a network according to the number of slaves.
关于陪伴人类的机器人的研究正在不断深入。宠物机器人通过与人类实时交互，无需任何特定控制即可提供行走辅助和搬运物品服务。然而，对于宠物机器人，用户可使用的机器人数量存在限制。如果克服这一限制，宠物机器人就能在更多领域提供服务。因此，在本研究中，我们提出一种采用群体概念的群体驱动中间件设计，它能提供有效的并行移动，使多个陪伴人类的机器人达成共同目标。中间件的功能分为三个部分：群体过程的序列管理器、消息管理器和相对位置识别管理器。该中间件通过使用IEEE 802.15.4 MAC协议的射频（RF）通信进行消息交换，处理群体中机器人的群体过程序列，并管理一个通过红外信号强度识别相对位置的红外（IR）通信模块。本研究中的群体由与用户交互的主机器人和不与用户交互的从机器人组成。这种组成旨在与难以预测的用户活动同步控制整个群体。我们评估了使用红外通信进行相对位置估计的准确性、从机器人对用户活动变化的响应时间以及根据从机器人数量组建网络的时间。
