Yang et al. Robot. Biomim. (2016) 3:21 DOI 10.1186/s40638-016-0054-y RESEARCH Open Access micROS: a morphable, intelligent and collective robot operating system Xuejun Yang, Huadong Dai, Xiaodong Yi*, Yanzhen Wang, Shaowu Yang, Bo Zhang, Zhiyuan Wang, Yun Zhou and Xuefeng Peng Abstract Robots are developing in much the same way that personal computers did 40 years ago, and robot operating system is the critical basis. Current robot software is mainly designed for individual robots. We present in this paper the design of micROS, a morphable, intelligent and collective robot operating system for future collective and collaborative robots. We first present the architecture of micROS, including the distributed architecture for collective robot system as a whole and the layered architecture for every single node. We then present the design of autonomous behavior management based on the observe–orient–decide–act cognitive behavior model and the design of collective intel- ligence including collective perception, collective cognition, collective game and collective dynamics. We also give the design of morphable resource management, which first categorizes robot resources into physical, information, cognitive and social domains, and then achieve morphability based on self-adaptive software technology. We finally deploy micROS on NuBot football robots and achieve significant improvement in real-time performance. Keywords: micROS, Robot operating system, OODA, Collective intelligence Background as Miro [3], Orca [4], RT-Middleware [5], Player/Stage The third industrial revolution is under its way [1]. [6], MARIE [7], RSCA [8] and Orocos [9]. Microsoft also Robots, as one of the most remarkable novel products in released Robotics Developer Studio [10] in 2006. In 2007, this revolution, will repeat the history of the rising of per- the release of Robot Operating System (ROS) version sonal computers and enter every home in a near future 1.0 [11] introduced the concept of operating system into [2]. The most important system software for robots, robotics for the first time. In recent years, this concept robot operating system, will be the key driving force for was gradually accepted by both academia and industry. this trend. It is able to effectively solve the major prob- An increasing number of experimental and commer- lems of low modularity and standardization level faced by cial robot systems base their research and development current robotic technology, in order to simplify software entirely or partially upon robot operating systems, even design, improve software quality, promote the integration including examples like the Aircrew Labor In-cockpit of new technologies and reduce production costs. Automation System (ALIAS) [12] and Robonaut 2 [13], Before the concept of robot operating system was intro- which requires very high real-time performance and duced, system software with the same functionalities was reliability. However, most of the aforementioned robot referred to as robotics middleware, robot software frame- operating systems mainly focused on development of work, or robotics development environment. They gained applications on individual robotic platform, despite the more and more attentions and research efforts since late fact that the vast majority of them support networking. 1990s, with typical initiatives gradually emerging, such It still remains an open issue for existing robot operating systems how to manage the heterogeneous resources and complex behaviors of collective robot systems to achieve *Correspondence: [email protected] collective intelligence. State Key Laboratory of High Performance Computing (HPCL), Computer School, National University of Defense Technology, 137 Yanwachi Street, In order to solve the above-mentioned problems and Changsha, China better adapt to the emerging of co-robot (i.e., cooperative © The Author(s) 2016. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. Yang et al. Robot. Biomim. (2016) 3:21 Page 2 of 9 robots) that would profoundly interact with the human Finally, “Conclusion and future work” section concludes society, this paper proposes the idea and design of a mor- the paper and discusses about potential future work. phable, intelligent and collective robot operating system, micROS. The main contribution of this paper is fourfold. Methods micROS architecture • The design choice of micROS is based on autono- Derived from the organization structures of collective mous behavior and collective intelligence, with man- robots, we designed for micROS the overall distributed agement of autonomous and collective robots as its architecture and the layered structure for individual node. major target; • The micROS architecture, in terms of both the dis- Organization structures for collective robots tributed collective architecture for collective robots Collective behaviors are deeply affected by organization and the layered architecture for individual robots, is structures, which are made of roles, relations and privi- proposed; leges. There are various organization structures for col- • We combine the observe–orient–decide–act (OODA) lective robots under different tasks and environments, cognitive behavior model and collective intelligence such as hierarchies, holarchies, coalitions, teams, congre- in the high-level architecture design and tackle the gations, federations, markets, matrices and societies [14]. four major challenges, i.e., autonomous observation A robot, a computer or even a human can serve as a node and collective perception, autonomous orientation in the organization structures. The left part of Fig. 1 illus- and collective cognition, autonomous decision and trates an example of organization structures. It consists collective game, autonomous action and collective of an environment, several nodes in two domains and a dynamics; node dominating others. All nodes together form a col- • The morphable and adaptive mechanism of micROS lection by collaborating with each other and interacting is designed based on adaptive software techniques. with the environment. The right part of Fig. 1 shows an example of co-robot collections with two domains serv- The remaining part of this paper is structured as follows. ing humans collaboratively in a city scenario. In the out- “micROS Architecture” section introduces the architec- door domain, unmanned aerial vehicles and unmanned ture of micROS. “Autonomous behavior and collective ground vehicles collaborate to percept, plan and share intelligence” section presents the mechanisms to imple- data to improve mobility. In the indoor domain, robots, ment autonomous behavior and collective intelligence. computers and smart terminals collaborate to provide a “Morphable and adaptive mechanism” section describes better service. the morphable and adaptive design of micROS. Practi- cal application of micROS in a RoboCup system (soccer The distributed architecture of micROS robots), as well as the corresponding experimental results, Inspired by organization structures, micROS is designed is presented in “Application and experiments” section. to be a distributed architecture which consists of lots of Fig. 1 Illustrative examples for collective organization structures (left) and co-robot collections in a city scenario (right), respectively Yang et al. Robot. Biomim. (2016) 3:21 Page 3 of 9 individuals (nodes) interconnected. The nodes could be self-organizing networks based on wireless communica- robots, computers or humans. micROS is installed on tion and provide mechanisms for robust interoperability. every node to form a distributed system, which is respon- Real-time guarantee is a distinguished feature of sible for management of resources and behaviors, coordi- micROS. micROS will implement three levels of real- nation of node–node and node–environment interaction time guarantee, i.e., node-level real time, message-level and self-organization in dynamic and open environment. real time and task-level real time. Node-level real-time Figure 2 shows how to map the city scenario example to guarantee is achieved by high-resolution timer, inter- micROS. rupt/event priorities, resource scheduling, non-blocking The distributed architecture of micROS implements communication, etc. Message-level real-time guarantee “inter-connecting, inter-communicating, interoperability, is achieved based on the network protocols, such as RT- inter-understanding and inter-obedience.” Interconnect- NET, which provide real-time support. Task-level real- ing and intercommunicating are implemented through time guarantee supports real-time constraint exchange distributed networking. Interoperability is supported by among interconnected nodes and real-time behavior for standardization, modularity and platformization. Inter- the entire system. understanding includes three aspects: human–robot, robot–robot and robot–environment. Inter-obedience The layered structure for micROS Nodes is expressed by rules in physical, information and social micROS is installed on each node of the collective robots domains. and exhibits the layered structure for each node, as Networking is the basis for constructing the distrib- shown in Fig. 3, which consists