Io, Ganymede, and Callisto A Multiagent Robot Trash-Collecting Team

Abstract

Georgia Tech won the Office Cleanup Event at the 1994 AAAI Mobile Robot Competition with a multi-robot cooperating team. This paper describes the design and implementation of these reactive trash-collecting robots, including details of multiagent cooperation, color vision for the detection of perceptual object classes, temporal sequencing of behaviors for task completion, and a language for specifying motor schema-based robot behaviors. 1 Introduction Georgia Tech's team of robots, Io, Ganymede and Callisto, (Figure 1) placed first in the "Clean Up the Office" event at the 1994 Robot Competition sponsored by the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). The contest required competing robot entries to clean up a messy office strewn with trash. Wads of paper, styrofoam coffee cups and soda cans were placed by judges throughout the contest arena along with wastebaskets where they hoped the robots would deposit the trash. The arena included ordinary tables, chairs and desks...