Research on robots that accompany humans is being continuously studied. The Pet-Bot\nprovides walking-assistance and object-carrying services without any specific controls through\ninteraction between the robot and the human in real time. However, with Pet-Bot, there is a limit to\nthe number of robots a user can use. If this limit is overcome, the Pet-Bot can provide services in more\nareas. Therefore, in this study, we propose a swarm-driving middleware design adopting the concept\nof a swarm, which provides effective parallel movement to allow multiple human-accompanying\nrobots to accomplish a common purpose. The functions of middleware divide into three parts:\na sequence manager for swarm process, a messaging manager, and a relative-location identification\nmanager. This middleware processes the sequence of swarm-process of robots in the swarm through\nmessage exchanging using radio frequency (RF) communication of an IEEE 802.15.4 MAC protocol\nand manages an infrared (IR) communication module identifying relative location with IR signal\nstrength. The swarm in this study is composed of the master interacting with the user and the slaves\nhaving no interaction with the user. This composition is intended to control the overall swarm in\nsynchronization with the user activity, which is difficult to predict. We evaluate the accuracy of the\nrelative-location estimation using IR communication, the response time of the slaves to a change in\nuser activity, and the time to organize a network according to the number of slaves.
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