whyscience/roborts

An open source software stack for Real-Time Strategy research on mobile robots

RoboRTS

RoboRTS is an open source software stack for Real-Time Strategy research on mobile robots, developed by RoboMaster. The Real-Time Strategy research that we focus on is multi-agent deep reinforcement learning based decision making.

The motivation for this project is RoboMaster AI Challenge. In this robot challenge, multiple robots should fight with each other on a game field automatically. It would be very convenient to have a unified framework for them to integrate hardware components and implement algorithms.

A modern mobile robot usually contains a simple low-level computing platform runs RT OS (Real Time Operation System) with restricted computing power but real-time output, and a strong high-level computing platform runs non-RT OS (such as Linux and Windows) which dedicates to computational intensive algorithm execution. In our system, the low-level computing platform is MCU (micro-controller), and the high-level computing platform is called the on-board computer.

The framework of RoboRTS consists two parts: autonomous mobile robot layer and intelligent decision-making layer.

The autonomous mobile robot layer alone can let a robot to demonstrate a certain level of intelligence. On its on-board computer runs perception, planning, decision modules, each of which contains some conventional algorithms like A* search and Lidar mapping. On its MCU, an RT low-level robot controller is implemented to govern the robot driving system. This README mainly explains the structure and functionality of this layer.

TODO: Intelligent decision-making layer includes a multi-agent decision-making framework and a game simulator, it will be released in the future.

Get started

You can build a mobile robot described in hardware_setup document and setup embedded system mentioned in RoboRTS-Firmware repository.

Software Requirements

• ROS kinetic (Ubuntu 16.04)
• OpenCV 3.0.0 or higher
• CUDA(Optional)
• PCL
• G2O
• SuiteSparse
• Google Protocol Buffers 2.6
• Google Glog
• CMake 3.1

Setup Software

Please follow this guide step by step.

On Nvidia Jetson TX2, please follow this tutorial(Chinese) for more details.

Documents

• Hardware setup: Instruction to build a RoboMaster infantry robot.
• Software architecture: The software architecture of RoboRTS framework.
• Protocol: The protocol between the on-board computer and the MCU.
• Tutorial: Additional tutorials will be released in the future.

Copyright and License

RoboRTS is provided under the GPL-v3.