RoboServ: A ROS Based Approach towards Providing Heterogeneous Robots as a Service

Abstract

We propose a new approach to Robot as a Service in which a team of heterogeneous robots composed of Pioneers and Turtle-bots can be controlled all under the same environment. Our approach uses the Robot Operating System (ROS) in order to provide communication between a workstation and the robots. These robots have a set of services that are available in a web server. Basically, two kind of robotic services are provided: monitor and control. The monitor can provide services as webcam viewing or map viewing. The control allows user either to move the robot or else to proceed with other preprogrammed tasks. In the experiments we first verify that the environment is working for controlling and monitoring a robot. Then we improve the system in order to control a heterogeneous robot team, thus validating the proposal. An an application, such basic approach can be further used by a team of robots in order to autonomous learn new tasks, from each other and also from human interaction, based on some interpreted language.