A framework for the development of cooperative robotic applications

The advances in mobile robotics, computing power, and wireless communications have turned feasible the development of communities of autonomous robots. In the last years, there is a greater interest in systems of multiple autonomous robots for the accomplishment of cooperative tasks. This project takes it into account and presents an architecture for the development of collaborative applications for a heterogeneous team of mobile robots based on embedded agents. The implemented architecture has the capacity to allow the team of robots to accomplish such tasks, and also it has tools and features that allow programmers to develop complex applications in a reasonable time. An agent-based development platform has been used for this purpose, due to it integrates the necessary capabilities for developing distributed applications, and manages the communications among all the components. To demonstrate the advantages of the architecture a real application, robot following, has been implemented. It consists of a set of embedded agents, which run in real robot systems, demonstrating that embedding agents in distributed intelligent systems is a powerful method for quick application development in the multirobot domain