Cooperative material handling by human and robotic agents: module development and system synthesis

Presents a collaborative effort to design and implement a cooperative material handling system by a small team of human and robotic agents in an unstructured indoor environment. The authors´ approach makes fundamental use of the human agents´ expertise for aspects of task planning, task monitoring, and error recovery. The authors´ system is neither fully autonomous nor fully teleoperated. It is designed to make effective use of the human´s abilities within the present state of the art of autonomous systems. The authors´ robotic agents refer to systems which are each equipped with at least one sensing modality and which possess some capability for self-orientation and/or mobility. The authors´ robotic agents are not required to be homogeneous with respect to either capabilities or function. The authors´ research stresses both paradigms and testbed experimentation. Theory issues include the requisite coordination principles and techniques which are fundamental to a cooperative multiagent system´s basic functioning. The authors have constructed an experimental distributed multiagent-architecture testbed facility. The required modular components of this testbed are currently operational and have been tested individually. The authors´ current research focuses on the agents´ integration in a scenario for cooperative material handling