[ADLink DDSBot] The ROS 2.0/1.0 based robots swarm architecture

Hi all,

We are happy to announce the release of a ROS 2 based robots swarm projects held in ADLINK Technology/PrismTech.

The typical solution for swarm robots in ROS 1 is using either different namespaces or external communication (outside of ROS middleware). However, by means of ROS2/DDS capability, we can solve this issue more effectively. As shown in figure below, each robot in our architecture is fully-independent, self-awareness and fully autonomous(by navigation stack). Then each robot publishes its global position to ROS2 Topic Layer through ros1_bridge. Therefore, all the others will be aware of its position with the help of custom “swarm_costmap_layer”. The swarm network allows robots to join and leave dynamically without human involving or any beforehand configuration. Furthermore, the developer/user is able to monitor&control all robots through a ROS 2 node.
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The demo video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZIDkLKD4Y8

Github link:
https://github.com/Adlink-ROS/adlink_ddsbot
Including all required files, tutorials, simulation and ready-to-go Pi3 image(ROS Kinetic & r2b2 with opensplice)

In addition, the robot in our experiments, called DDSBot, is a extremely low-cost platform. The total cost of each robot is lower than 250USD (inc, lidar, Pi3, battery). All necessary document, firmware/software source codes are opened and under Apache 2.0 License.

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