A study on dynamically reconfigurable robotic systems. 4th Report, Analysis and evaluation of Cellular Robotics(CEBOT) as a distributed intelligent system by communication information and knowledge amounts.

Abstract

Cellular robotics (CEBOT) has been previously reported by the authors as one realization of a dynamically reconfigurable robotic system (DRRS). CEBOT is considered to be a very flexible system and will be applicable to a robotic system which works in various environments. When CEBOT is required to perform tasks, many cells, which can be knowledge sources, communicate with each other and then carry out the tasks automatically. So CEBOT is also a decentralized coordinated reasoning system and is one of the distributed intelligent systems. In designing a distributed intelligence system, the distribution of the communication volume among the cells becomes a central issue. For the case of CEBOT, it is best that reasoning can be carried out among each knowledge sources with as little communication as possible. Therefore, each cell must have the ability to reallocate their knowledge automatically in order to reduce the amount of communication; this is called intelligent communication in this paper. In this paper, we propose one of the communication evaluation method based on the amount of communication information and also describe an optimal knowledge allocation method on CEBOT as one realization of a distributed coordinated reasoning system by introducing the sensitivity function of the knowledge allocation.