A society of agents for service robots

This article presents an agent based distributed software architecture for machine and robot control. The functionality of agents of this architecture has been inspired by Marvin Minsky´s definition of the term in his book “The Society of Mind” (1986) [1]. Minsky, widely considered to be one of the fathers of artificial intelligence, tried to describe from an engineering point of view, in this book, how he thought the mind works: “I´ll call “Society of Mind” this scheme in which each mind is made of many smaller processes. These we´ll call agents. Each mental agent by itself can only do some simple thing that needs no mind or thought at all. Yet when we join these agents in societies-in certain very special ways-this leads to true intelligence.” Societies of simple behaving agents have been implemented in Fatronik, in real robots, and have been demonstrated to be able to perform complex tasks in industrial environments. This article explains the features of such societies of agents and presents their implementation in a real robot.