An architecture for cooperative and autonomous mobile robots

The author describes an architecture for cooperative and autonomous mobile robots. The cooperation is composed of two phases: collaboration where a task is decomposed into subtasks and subtasks are allocated through a set of robots, and coordination where robots actually coordinate their activities to fulfil the initial task using the notion of coordinated protocols. This architecture exhibits benefits such as (1) modularity (the robot can work autonomously or within a team); (2) robustness (although some modules on the robot fail, it is still able to perform useful tasks); and (3) programmability. An example using two real robots is described to show the approach