Adaptive and cooperative mobile robots

Abstract

This paper focuses on the development of intelligent multiagent robot teams capable of acting autonomously and of collaborating in a dynamic environment to reach team objectives. The paper proposes a new adaptive action selection architecture that enables a team of robot agents to achieve adaptive cooperative control and modify their performance during the specified time of the mission. These abilities are important because of uncertainty in the environmental conditions and because of possible functional failures in some team members. The improvement in team performance is achieved by updating the control parameters of the robots based on knowledge acquired on-line. Experiments have been conducted on teams of mobile robots performing a cooperative box-pushing task. The results show that the robot teams were able to achieve adaptive cooperative control despite dynamic changes in the environment and variations in the capabilities of the team members.