Robotics Technology - Robot Open Control (ROC)

The Robot Open Control™ (The ROC™) is a robot operating system that provides autonomy for individual robots and collaboration for teams of mobile robots. The ROC delivers safe, predictable, coherent and coordinated behavior in dynamic and hostile environments.

The ROC is a highly reactive decision making software platform that is unique in applying multiple procedural reasoning system (PRS) engines to the behavior of robots. Humans set objectives and provide a menu of plans with which the robots run their missions and adapt within their changing environment. The ROC provides intelligent navigation path finding, detection of anomalies, threat-response analysis and collaborative team behaviors.

The ROC is hardware-independent and can be run on a variety of computing platforms. One of these hardware platforms is the PC-104 hardware platform shown below.

Capabilities

• Intelligent autonomous navigation and team path planning.
• Detection of anomalies with group situational awareness.
• Threat detection and response on a team level.
• Hierarchies of teams analogous to military command structures.
• Human override control of any robot(s) in the system.

Features

• Platform-independent implementation using open source tools and high-level development systems.
• Multiple PRS engines limit search spaces/time, solve conflicting goals and a regulator mechanism apportions cycles to the engines.
• Performs tens of thousands of reasoning cycles per second with linear performance out to many thousands of machine nodes.
• Reasons about multiple tasks, acts on partial plans and provides meta-level reasoning.

Benefits

• Runs efficiently on commercially available microprocessors.
• Customers can program their missions and adjust them easily in the field.
• Provides deterministic behaviour, where progress toward objectives is guaranteed and robots do not get stuck in conflicting reasoning cycles.
• Supports very large/complex system implementations.

To request a White Paper on the ROC, click here. To explore how the ROC can be applied to your needs, click here>>