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Sponsored by the ArtistDesign European Network of Excellence on Embedded Systems Design |
CyberRescue@RTSS2009 is the simulated robotic competition that is held in conjunction with the Real-Time Systems Symposium (RTSS) 2009, the most prestigious conference in the field of Real-time computing and communication systems.
The design competition proposed for RTSS 2009 develops around a simulated multi-robot rescue mission. Each team is composed by five mobile autonomous agents that need to find a specific spot in a maze (target) and join there. This challenge falls in the foraging class, one of the canonical testbeds for cooperative robotics, and raises challenges in real-time control for adequate navigation, real-time ad-hoc communication within the team, topology management to keep connectivity, and others that have been addressed by the real-time systems community at large, in the recent years.
Each participating team is composed by 5 independent, but desirably cooperating, robotic agents. The robots can communicate with each other using an emulated ad-hoc wireless communication protocol with realistic parameters: limited bandwidth, limited range and a random non-zero latency and error probability. Beyond the communication capabilities, each robot has its own set of sensors (obstacle, GPS, compass, beacon, collision, hear and ground) and actuators (motors, communication and leds) The robotic team forms a distributed system.
The major competition challenge is thus to develop efficient cooperation strategies capable of minimizing the time required to find the target area and bring all the robots there, considering constrained communication resources and sensors.