ALLIANCE-ROS: a software architecture on ROS for fault-tolerant cooperative multi-robot systems

Programming multi-robot systems is a complicated and time-consuming work, due to two challenges, i.e., the distributed multi-robot cooperation and the robot software reusability. ALLIANCE [1] is a fully distributed, fault-tolerant and behavior-based model. ROS (Robot Operating System) provides abundant robot software modules. In this paper, by combining both, we propose a software architecture named ALLIANCE-ROS for developing fault-tolerant cooperative multi-robot systems with a lot of software resources available. We encapsulate the ROS mechanisms and Python libraries to construct the basic function units of the ALLIANCE model. One may inherit them to construct the ALLIANCE-model-application with all ROS algorithms, modules and resources available. This work is demonstrated by an experiment of multi-robot patrol in both the simulated and the real environments.