Multi-agent CORBA-based robotics vision architecture for cue integration

Abstract

The robustness of a given vision system in the field of robotics is a very challenging problem and represents a major bottleneck in any industrial setting. Nevertheless, there is a hypothesis that the fusion of multiple natural features facilitates a robust detection and object tracking in scenes of real world complexity. Several fusion methods have been tested for cue integration with good results, but the computational effort grows as the number of features increases. This research work represents a variant of the fusion method based both on distributed systems and on an agent concept. In this work, multiple agents interact with each other to perform different roles. The structure has a cooperative approach so that the agents work as a team. The communication among the agents is based on the Event Service of CORBA technology. By using this architecture, we are exploiting the parallelism and concurrency of distributed systems, and by using the concept of agents we are exploiting the encapsulation concept to built modular systems.