Y. Demazeau et al. (Eds.): PAAMS 2014, LNAI 8473, pp. 363–366, 2014. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014 Multi-robot System for Vacuum Cleaning Domain Agris Nikitenko, Janis Grundspenkis, Aleksis Liekna, Martins Ekmanis, Guntis Kulikovskis, and Ilze Andersone Riga Technical University, Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology, Department of Systems Theory and Design, 1 Kalku Street, Riga, LV 1658, Latvia {agris.nikitenko,janis.grundspenkis,aleksis.liekna, martins.ekmanis,guntis.kulikovskis,ilze.andersone}@rtu.lv Abstract. This demonstration paper presents a prototype multi-robot system of va- cuum cleaning robots. System was designed with the aim to join multiple robots in a team able to accomplish tasks that are beyond the capabilities of a single robot. Keywords: Multi-robot systems, vacuum cleaning. 1 Introduction Vacuum-cleaning robots are becoming more popular among household users. Such robots are capable of cleaning individual rooms and small offices. Nevertheless, cleaning large indoor areas such as hangars is still a challenge, which had not been addressed by commercial applications yet.. To address this challenge we have devel- oped a multi-robot vacuum-cleaning system. We use existing iRobot Roomba 1 vacuum cleaning robots as robot platforms. We improved them with additional capa- bilities required for participating in a multi-robot system by attaching a custom-made extension on top of the robot. This extension includes a computational element with an Intel Atom 2 processor, a web-camera for localization purposes, additional bumper sensor and an additional battery. The added computational element provides means to address localization, map building and path planning as well as interaction functional- ity with team members. System architecture is partially centralized, where a central server plays the central role by allocating tasks to individual robots and merging individually created robot maps. When a task is assigned to a robot, the task is executed autonomously and the server has no direct control over the low-level actions of the robots. System operates in the following way. User initiates the task allocation procedure by requesting a cleaning operation using the user interface. This request is then sent to server and it spreads the whole cleaning area into smaller sub-regions called re- sponsibility areas. Each robot is assigned a responsibility area. After receiving such 1 http://www.irobot.com 2 http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/processors/atom/ atom-processor.html