Suppressing the Total Costs of Executing Tasks Using Mobile Agents

Abstract

This paper presents a framework for controlling multiple robots connected by communication networks. Instead of making multiple robots pursue several tasks simultaneously, the framework makes mobile software agents migrate from one robot to another to perform the tasks. Since mobile software agents can migrate to arbitrary robots by wireless communication networks, they can find the most suitably equipped and/or the most suitably located robots to perform their task. In the previous papers, we have showed that this manner of controlling multiple robots can decrease the number of required robot resources, and therefore can suppress energy consumption in aggregation. In this paper, we focus on the efficiency aspect of the manner of controlling multiple robots. Our controlling manner for multiple robot is expected to achieve further contribution for suppressing the total costs of executing tasks. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our manner of controlling multiple robot by numerical experiments.