A Hardware-Agnostic Approach to Supervise Heterogeneous Autonomous Mobile Robots

A team of heterogeneous autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) has the potential to perform complex missions for a variety of industrial and non-industrial applications. However, suitable means of command and control for multiple AMRs pose a major challenge for a human operator, as this complicates the predictability and controllability of individual AMRs. This insufficient ability to accurately assess each robot's behavior makes it difficult to conduct adequate human oversight, which is demanded by law. Addressing this challenge, this article presents an approach for a hardware-agnostic supervision of AMRs. This approach aims to ensure adequate human oversight of heterogeneous AMRs by providing support through technical monitoring. For this purpose, monitors are used as communication partners for AMRs and query necessary information on safe behavior at runtime. Gathered information is compared with a set of rules and violations of safety constraints are reported to the human operator. Thus, the behavior of each AMR to be supervised effectively without the need for additional sensors or detailed knowledge of the respective hardware.