A ROS~2-based Navigation and Simulation Stack for the Robotino

The Robotino, developed by Festo Didactic, serves as a versatile platform in education and research for mobile robotics tasks. However, there currently is no ROS2 integration for the Robotino available. In this paper, we describe our work on a Webots simulation environment for a Robotino platform extended by LIDAR sensors. A ROS2 integration and a pre-configured setup for localization and navigation using existing ROS packages from the Nav2 suite are provided. We validate our setup by comparing simulations with real-world experiments conducted by three Robotinos in a logistics environment in our lab. Additionally, we tested the setup using a ROS 2 hardware driver for the Robotino developed by team GRIPS of the RoboCup Logistics League. The results demonstrate the feasibility of using ROS2 and Nav2 for navigation tasks on the Robotino platform showing great consistency between simulation and real-world performance.

Towards Using Promises for Multi-Agent Cooperation in Goal Reasoning

Reasoning and planning for mobile robots is a challenging problem, as the world evolves over time and thus the robot's goals may change. One technique to tackle this problem is goal reasoning, where the agent not only reasons about its actions, but also about which goals to pursue. While goal reasoning for single agents has been researched extensively, distributed, multi-agent goal reasoning comes with additional challenges, especially in a distributed setting. In such a context, some form of coordination is necessary to allow for cooperative behavior. Previous goal reasoning approaches share the agent's world model with the other agents, which already enables basic cooperation. However, the agent's goals, and thus its intentions, are typically not shared. In this paper, we present a method to tackle this limitation. Extending an existing goal reasoning framework, we propose enabling cooperative behavior between multiple agents through promises, where an agent may promise that certain facts will be true at some point in the future. Sharing these promises allows other agents to not only consider the current state of the world, but also the intentions of other agents when deciding on which goal to pursue next. We describe how promises can be incorporated into the goal life cycle, a commonly used goal refinement mechanism. We then show how promises can be used when planning for a particular goal by connecting them to timed initial literals (TILs) from PDDL planning. Finally, we evaluate our prototypical implementation in a simplified logistics scenario.