RoboCup is particularly well-known for its soccer leagues, but there are an increasing number of application leagues. The newest one is the RoboCup Logistics League (RCLL) where groups of robots take on the task of in-factory production logistics. Development of a robust and capable integrated system to operate a group of autonomous mobile robots for an environment like the RCLL can be a tedious and longsome enterprise. This can be a barrier for new (or rebooting) teams and slow down even seasoned teams.
To foster the development of the RCLL as a whole and in the hope to serve as an example, the Carologistics RoboCup Team has released their full software stack used for winning the RCLL 2016. It is based on the Fawkes Robot Software Framework for which we just released version 1.0.0. While major parts have always been openly available, the release also includes all parts which they developed in private specific to this domain and which were considered the competitive edge. The Carologistics provide this in one coherent and tested package that will reduce the effort required to get a full running robot for the RCLL tremendously.
Some of the highlights that the package contains are components for robot self-localization and navigation, perception and vision, basic behaviors (skills) using our Lua-based Behavior Engine, and the complete task-level executive based on CLIPS (this year’s release does not contain the behavior model for the production phase). With the included simulation integration, you can immediately start and have a complete system based on the world champion 2016. Compared to last year’s release the software has been adapted to the new rules and improved robustness during MPS interaction. It contains several new and considerably improved components and libraries. For example, the Robotino driver plugin now supports direct communication with the controller board bypassing OpenRobotino providing time-stamped and faster data access.
We were awarded the third place of the First International Harting Open Source Award at RoboCup 2016, Leipzig, Germany, for the continued public release of the full RCLL software stack based on Fawkes.
Videos
The following video shows the RoboCup 2016 finals between the Carologistics and Solidus. The released software stack is the one used by the Carologistics team, which won the competition.
The following video shows the software stack running in simulation with an explanation of its features. The simulation integration is an important part of the software release and has been a crucial factor in developing the software.
The software has been developed for more than ten years by numerous people and has been used in the Middle-Size and Standard Platform soccer leagues, the RoboCup@Home league, the RCLL, and projects aside from RoboCup, like Hybrid Reasoning for Intelligent Systems and HERB at CMU. In the last four years the Carologistics team has been the major driving force developing the framework and its components to its present state. Important contributions were made by the AllemaniACs RoboCup team.
Adoption and Reference
We invite teams to take a look and adopt Fawkes as their software platform. All parts are Open Source software and the vast majority of components are developed in the public. We welcome contributions from anyone and hope to help newcomer teams to get a better start. In combination with the publicly developed simulation it should be far easier to perform better than ever before.
Should you make use of the software stack in part or full, please refer to the paper Fawkes for the RoboCup Logistics League (Niemueller, Reuter, Ferrein) published at the RoboCup Symposium 2015.
Download
The package is released under the same license as Fawkes itself.
Docker Image
There is a Docker image to quickly try the simulation. It is provided as-is and we cannot offer any support.