Dynamic Control of a Robotic Swarm using a Service-Oriented Architecture

The development, deployment, and control of groups of robots is a tedious process even for experienced roboticists. Particularly in heterogeneous systems a high granularity of control and visibility is difficult to achieve. The lack of standardized interfaces and communication protocols to interconnect robots from different manufacturers makes it very difficult to develop flexible robotic applications. We propose an efficient system suited to support heterogeneous robotic swarms that can be used as a toolkit for fast prototyping of robust distributed applications. This system offers a flexible interface allowing external users to remotely control the swarm over the internet by using standardized communication protocols such as Web Services.