Dynamic connection handling for scalable robotic systems using ROS2

Abstract: Multi-agent robot systems, especially for mobile robots in dynamic environments interacting with humans, have seen an increased interest over the past years. Many vehicle manufactures (e.g.Volvo GTO) have been following the trend and has started investigating a possible implementation of an autonomous-transport robot system for material delivery in production environments.First implementations of a system have been built using ROS2 and initialising static amounts of participating robots.Throughout this thesis, scalability is emphasised to enhance and add new use cases to the system.This thesis investigates possible improvements for the system by adding a dynamic connection handling, which allows robots to connect and disconnect under the system's run time.Furthermore, the performance of the connection handling in the system is evaluated in simulation for increasing system complexity in terms of the amount of connected robots.The first part of the thesis presents an approach for the dynamic connection and disconnection of robots to the network using service client communication approaches.An implementation is tested in a simulation based on an excerpt from the legacy system.Furthermore, two methods are proposed for detecting possible communication losses. The thesis work simulates the increase of the number of robots in the system at different publishing rates. It compares a many to one communication approach, where multiple robots communicate to a central node over one topic, to the one to one communication approach, where multiple robots communicate over particular topics to a central node.The simulations have shown that with an increase of nodes, the average data age and the data miss ratio in the one to one approach were significantly lower than in the multi to one approach.