Design, Implementation, and Performance Evaluation of a Web-Based Multiple Robot Control System

Abstract

Heterogeneous multiple robots are currently being used in smart homes and industries for different purposes. The authors have developed the Web interface to control and interact with multiple robots with autonomous robot registration. The autonomous robot registration engine (RRE) was developed to register all robots with relevant ROS topics. The ROS topic identification algorithm was developed to identify the relevant ROS topics for the publication and the subscription. The Gazebo simulator spawns all robots to interact with a user. The initial experiments were conducted with simple instructions and then changed to manage multiple instructions using a state transition diagram. The number of robots was increased to evaluate the system’s performance by measuring the robots’ start and stop response time. The authors have conducted experiments to work with the semantic interpretation from the user instruction. The mathematical equations for the delay in response time have been derived by considering each experiment’s input given and system characteristics. The Big O representation is used to analyze the running time complexity of algorithms developed. The experiment result indicated that the autonomous robot registration was successful, and the communication performance through the Web decreased gradually with the number of robots registered.