ROBxTASK RTE - a lightweight runtime environment to implement collaborative processes across different robotic systems

Abstract

In the research project ROBxTASK a platform is being developed that allows users to define robotic workflows using the visual programming language Google Blockly. Users can create custom agent code to call the skills of the robotic systems, send/receive messages between agents and thus orchestrate workflows for multiple agents. To meet these requirements, a simple runtime environment (RTE) is developed in Python to enable the integration of various robot infrastructures into an overall architecture. This RTE provides communication between agents, simple service discovery and dispatching, testability without hardware, logging and monitoring of processes, and requires only an MQTT broker as minimal infrastructure. Using an industrial part delivery use case, we show how this simple RTE can be used to develop autonomous, self-mediated, collaborative robotic workflows, as well as to integrate human operators into decision-making processes.