ROS-TMS and Big Sensor Box: Platforms for Informationally Structured Environment

Abstract

This paper proposes new software and hardware platforms for an informationally structured environment named ROS-TMS and Big Sensor Box. We started the development of a management system for an informationally structured environment named TMS (Town Management System) in Robot Town Project in 2005. Since then we are continuing our efforts for the improvement of the performance and the enhancement of the functions of the TMS. Recently, we launched a new version of TMS named ROS-TMS, which resolves some critical problems in TMS by adopting ROS (Robot Operating System) and utilizing the high scalability and a plenty of resources of ROS. In this paper, we firstly discuss about the requirement and the structure of a software platform for an informationally structured environment, and describe in detail our latest system, ROS-TMS version 4.0. Next, we show the requirement of a hardware platform for an informationally structured environment, and introduce a hardware platform named Big Sensor Box, in which a variety of sensors are embedded and service robots are operated according to the structured information under the management of the ROS-TMS. Robot service experiments including a fetch-and-give task and autonomous control of a wheelchair robot are also conducted in Big Sensor Box.