Multi-Agent Robotic System Architecture for Effective Task Allocation and Management
Recent Researches in Communications, Electronics, Signal Processing & Automatic: Proceedings of the 11th WSEAS International Conference on Signal Processing, Robotics and Automation (ISPRA '12) 2012
Egons Lavendelis, Aleksis Liekna, Agris Ņikitenko, Arvīds Grabovskis, Jānis Grundspeņķis

Large number of autonomous robot solutions exists for various missions and domains. These robots are sufficient for the missions they are built for. At the same time each of them has limited functional and physical capabilities. Multi robot systems can be used to remove these limits. However it is true only in case when the system ensures effective interaction among the robots i.e. enables their social behaviour. Usually it is hard to implement such capabilities directly into robots due to functional and physical limitations and heterogeneity of the team. One of possible solutions is to implement management systems outside the robots. It should decompose tasks, allocate subtasks to specific robots and monitor the execution of the assigned tasks. In order to avoid inherent drawback of fully centralized systems a significant level of autonomy has to be preserved. Intelligent agents fulfil these requirements. Therefore we propose a general multi-agent system’s architecture for multi-robot management system for applications with a common goal. It can be used to implement various purpose multi-robot systems from existing single operating robots without major changes in their software and hardware. A vacuum cleaning problem of a large area is considered as an application case.


Keywords
Multi-Robot System, Intelligent Robotics, Multi-Agent System, Multi-Agent Architecture, Multi-Robot Task Allocation

Lavendelis, E., Liekna, A., Ņikitenko, A., Grabovskis, A., Grundspeņķis, J. Multi-Agent Robotic System Architecture for Effective Task Allocation and Management. In: Recent Researches in Communications, Electronics, Signal Processing & Automatic: Proceedings of the 11th WSEAS International Conference on Signal Processing, Robotics and Automation (ISPRA '12), United Kingdom, Cambridge, 22-24 February, 2012. Cambridge: WSEAS Press, 2012, pp.167-174. ISBN 978-1-61804-069-5.

Publication language
English (en)
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