Interface for Controlling a Fleet of Generic Machines

Abstract This paper presents a dynamic interface for controlling a machine and a fleet of machines. A distributed communication framework, named GIMnet, provides in addition to service based communication, a tool listing all the available services in the network. On top of GIMnet, a hardware abstraction layer, named MaCI, is developed which is used to control and provide information from robots in a generic way. All the services that robots are providing are named so, that they can be identified from which robot and which device they belong to. Based on the service discovery, naming of services and the clients of MaCI, an interface for connecting and controlling a machine or a group of machines is presented. In case of new services from the machine appears, the interface dynamically connects to them and so provides a way to get information from it. In this work, as a use case, the interface is used to control a group of generic machines in a wanted formation.