Agent-based Application Framework for Multiple Mobile Robots Cooperation

We present an agent-based framework for the development of distributed applications for a team of heterogenous mobile robots. The main goal is to ease the development of cooperative tasks among teams of robots. The proposed architecture must have not only the capacity to allow the team of robots to accomplish such tasks, but also it must have tools and features that allow programmers to develop complex applications in a reasonable time. Agent-based development platforms are used for this purpose, integrating the necessary capabilities for developing distributed applications, and managing the communications among all the components. To demonstrate the advantages of the proposed framework, two real applications, remote vision and robot following, are presented. Both of them consist of a set of agents, and run actually in real robot systems, demonstrating that distributed systems do not add significant overhead to real-time tasks.