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Distributed Control of a Multiple Tethered Mobile Robot System for Highway Maintenance and Construction

The development of a distributed control system for a multiple mobile robot system is described. The mobile robots considered have been termed tethered mobile robots (TMRs). The TMRs are differentially steered, wheeled mobile robots tethered to a support vehicle, and they have been designed for automating highway maintenance and construction. The control system consists of a network of a host computer and several real‐time dynamic controllers running under Windows for Workgroups and DOS operating systems, respectively. Advanced industrial embedding technology is applied to the hardware design, and the system's fault‐tolerance is achieved from a distributed architecture and overall condition monitoring. The object‐oriented and hardware‐independent software programming provides a graphic user interface and flexibility for a large number of highway maintenance and construction tasks. It also provides convenience for any other mobile robotics research applications.