System architecture enabling multiple kinds of mobile robots to coexist

Abstract

The evolution of robotics technologies has produced many kinds of robots, for example, cleaning robots, guidance robots, and transfer robots. In the future, these robots will coexist in the same public facilities. Without traffic rules for mobile robot systems, highly qualified technologies must be implemented on mobile robots. Consequently, the robot market will not be expanded. To resolve this problem, RRI (Robot Revolution & Industrial IoT Initiative)’s subcommittee has discussed robot system architecture independent on highly qualified technologies. In this paper, mobile robot system architecture featuring an operation management map and an arbitration function is proposed. This architecture enables multiple mobile robots to run smoothly with each other by relatively simple technologies.