Task-oriented hierarchical control architecture for swarm robotic system

An increasing number of robotic systems involving lots of robotic individuals are used to serve human, such as intelligent terminal, intelligent storage, intelligence factories, etc. It is a trend of robotics technology that robotics system will become huger with more individuals. In these systems, they form the robotic societies and need establish some computing rules and mechanisms to ensure the operation like all biological social systems. In this paper, a novel system architecture for swarm robotic system, including three layers: human–computer interaction layer, planning layer and execution layer, is put forward, which is effective for task-oriented swarm robotic system. Then, a hierarchical organizational model for the system is presented, which is used to establish management relationship between different layers and individuals. Because task-oriented characteristic is required, this paper elaborates task description knowledge to explain the relationship between tasks for task decomposition and task logic. In addition, a method of behavior generation based on proposition/transition Petri networks is designed, which would effectively assist the system to construct combined behavior using simple individual behavior to solve a variety of tasks. At last, Illustration is shown to prove effectiveness and an implementation of the method based on SociBuilder system is introduced.