Accession Number:

ADA279839

Title:

Heterogeneous Multi-Robot Cooperation

Descriptive Note:

Technical rept.

Corporate Author:

MASSACHUSETTS INST OF TECH CAMBRIDGE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE LAB

Personal Author(s):

• Parker, Lynne E.

Report Date:

1994-02-01

Pagination or Media Count:

244.0

Abstract:

This report addresses the problem of achieving cooperation within small- to medium-sized teams of heterogeneous mobile robots. I describe a software architecture I have developed, called ALLIANCE, that facilitates robust, fault tolerant, reliable, and adaptive cooperative control. In addition, an extended version of ALLIANCE, called L-ALLIANCE, is described, which incorporates a dynamic parameter update mechanism that allows teams of mobile robots to improve the efficiency of their mission performance through learning. A number of experimental results of implementing these architectures on both physical and simulated mobile robot teams are described. In addition, this report presents the results of studies of a number of issues in mobile robot cooperation, including fault tolerant cooperative control, adaptive action selection, distributed control, robot awareness of team member actions, improving efficiency through learning, inter-robot communication, action recognition, and local versus global control. Cooperative robotics, Behavior- based, Emergent, Distributed control, Fault tolerant, Action selection.

Descriptors:

• *ROBOTS
• *COOPERATION
• CONTROL
• GLOBAL
• ROBOTICS
• EFFICIENCY
• MOBILE
• HETEROGENEITY
• LEARNING
• FAULT TOLERANCE
• FAULTS
• AWARENESS
• SELECTION
• BEHAVIOR
• MISSIONS
• PROBLEM SOLVING
• COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE
• DYNAMICS
• PARAMETERS

Subject Categories:

• Cybernetics

Distribution Statement:

APPROVED FOR PUBLIC RELEASE