Towards a Comprehensive Framework for Teamwork in Behavior-Based Robots

摘要

Teams of robots are increasingly deployed in real world applications. One of the key challenges in building such teams is to automate the control of teamwork, such that the designer can concentrate her efforts on the taskwork to be done. This paper presents steps towards a novel framework addressing this challenge in teams of behavior-based agents. The framework provides a rich representation that facilitates management of teamwork knowledge, and separates behaviors that govern a robot's interaction with its task from behaviors that govern a robot's interaction with its team- mates. In addition, the paper presents a set of algorithms that control the execution and communication of behaviors, to automate synchronization and allocation of behaviors to sub-teams. We describe our implementation of the framework in the BITE architec- ture, a distributed behavior-based architecture providing automated coordination and collaboration services in a team of Sony AIBO robots.