Development of a Client-Server Module for Cooperative Multi-Robot Longterm Map Registration

Nowadays a big amount of robots are used in production and logistic. Due to the large working environment, dynamic objects (e.g. humans or other robots), and semi-static objects (e.g.machine and furniture), a high performance navigation system is required. But only focus on the high performance long term SLAM on single robot is not enough to guarantee the flexible and accurate performance of whole robot fleet in large changing environment. So besides the efficient long term SLAM on single robot, considerable attention has been paid to the cooperative SLAM. In cooperative SLAM, through a central Map-Server, the robots can exchange their maps, which contain observed dynamic changes. In this work, a central Map-Server for cooperative SLAM has been developed to realize the accurate map exchange between two agents (a mobile robot and a static sensor). The agents uploaded their individual maps to Map-Server and these maps were first registered with the global map of Map-Server and then the contained dynamic changes inside would be integrated into the global map of Map-Server.