dc.description.abstract | In this thesis we present the development of a distributed and
parallel environment which offers functionality to robots to support
them in their task performance. We want the environment to be a
framework where students can experiment with robots, and in which we
can arrange robot competitions.
Our motivation for this thesis is an earlier developed robot system at
our department. It was used as an instrument to demonstrate the
principles and practice of distributed and high performance parallel
computing. The system was used by students on advanced courses on
cluster architecture and programming, and popular competitions were
held in it. The old system had many infrastructure demands and had to
be closed. We want to make a new system that has less infrastructure
demands and more functionality.
The environment has control over a certain amount of work space where
the robots can operate. Within this work space, the environment offers
functionality that includes context awareness, location, mapping,
naming, and structured interfaces for interaction between the
different components. Users can control the robots through the
environment, and they assign tasks to the robots. Users can also
download extensions to robots through the environment, and robots can
upload data to the environment.
The state of the environment, the robots and the work space is
visualized on a display wall. Users can interact with this
visualization and assign simple tasks through it. | en |