Software Agents for Autonomous Robots: the Eurobot 2006 Experience

Abstract

Agent-based software architectures have been used and exploited in many application fields. In this paper, we report our experience about using agents for an unusual task: controlling an autonomous robot playing a kind of golf game in an international robotic competition. Driving a real robot is a practical application field for software agents, because different subsystems need to be controlled and synchronised in order to realize a global game strategy: cooperating agents can easily fit the target. Since this application requires a soft real-time platform to guarantee fast and reliable actions, and also a valuable communication system to gain feedback from sensors and to issue commands to actuators, we chose Erlang as programming language. A two-layer multi-agent system was thus designed and realized, composed of a lower layer, hosting agents taking care of the interface with sensors and actuators, and a higher layer, where agents are in charge of intelligent activities related to game strategy.