Heterogeneous Logistics Fleet Integration

Period 2023.05 – 2025.05 · Affiliation Korea Electronics Technology Institute (KETI), Cooperative-Intelligence Robot Plus Competitiveness Support Program · Role Multi-robot operating system setup, free_fleet modification and coordinate registration, docking control handover, sensor-based obstacle perception, external system communication integration, simulation and GUI tool development

Progress by Phase

Open-RMF and free_fleet core (2023): Built nav_graphs with traffic_editor, added a custom robot model plugin (slotcar), wrote a verification checklist for multi-robot traffic, tasks, and visualization, analyzed free_fleet and registered the traffic_editor and Nav2 map coordinate frames, integrated the real TETRA_DSV_M robot (Cartographer mapping + ros1_bridge + free_fleet), and modified the free_fleet ROS 1 ClientNode with pause and arrival topics.
Docking, obstacle avoidance, and control handover (H2 2023): TETRA cart docking scenario, integration of rmf_obstacle_detectors and lane_blocker, design of a state machine (Moro_controller) that hands Open-RMF control over during docking and returns it afterward, and ROS 2 joy teleop.
Mapping, sensor perception, and real-robot validation (2024): Namespace-based Cartographer, PCD to PGM conversion (3D to 2D maps), LiDAR dynamic obstacle detection, camera-based YOLO object detection with 3D coordinate transformation, and a real-robot demonstration of YOLOv8 obstacle recognition with a RealSense D435.
External system communication (H2 2024): Stacker AMR operation (MCP, VehiclePlanner, ACS, QR-based precision docking), the stacker-to-ACS TCP/IP communication protocol, and MiR 600 usage and programming.
Simulation, networking, and GUI upgrades (2024–2025): Battery system and LiDAR obstacle-avoidance simulation, review of Isaac Sim examples and their integration with Open-RMF, MQTT networking fundamentals (Mosquitto), migration from Gazebo Classic to Gazebo Sim, RViz2 URDF and TF visualization, and an integrated GUI built with Qt Designer, PySide6, and rclpy.

Results

Open-RMF integration of the real TETRA_DSV_M robot and a real-robot demonstration of YOLOv8 obstacle recognition.
The project’s themes of Open-RMF cooperative autonomous driving and cross-utilization of obstacle information led to the KROC 2024 (Kim et al., 2024) and ICROS 2024 (Kim et al., 2024) papers, and the PySide6 fleet management GUI later became the foundation of the anomaly detection fault injection GUI.

Tech Stack

Open-RMF · free_fleet · Nav2 · ROS 2 / ROS 1 (ros1_bridge) · Cartographer · Gazebo (Classic / Sim) · Isaac Sim · YOLOv8 · RealSense D435/D455 · TETRA cart · Stacker AMR · MiR 600 · PySide6 / Qt · MQTT

A server-client fleet management system that integrates the Open-RMF middleware with ROS Navigation, so that multiple mobile robots receive tasks from the server and drive cooperatively without collisions using RMF traffic negotiation. Feasibility was validated with real-robot experiments.

Obstacles detected by each mobile robot with a 2D LiDAR and an RGB-D camera (YOLOv8) are transformed into the global map frame and shared so that other robots can use them for collaborative path planning. In the Open-RMF fleet manager, lanes are marked active or inactive from the shared obstacle information so that robots only travel on active lanes. Validated in Gazebo with two robots.

Progress by Phase

Results

Tech Stack

References

2024