A robot with a decentralized consensus-making mechanism based on the immune system

Abstract

In recent years much attention has been focused on behavior-based artificial intelligence (AI), which has already demonstrated its robustness and flexibility against dynamically changing world. However, in this approach, the followings have not yet been resolved: how do we construct an appropriate arbitration mechanism, and how do we prepare appropriate competence modules. In this paper, to overcome these problems, we propose a new decentralised consensus-making system inspired by the biological immune system. And we apply our proposed method to behavior arbitration for an autonomous mobile robot, namely garbage collecting problem that takes into account the concept of self-sufficiency. To verify the feasibility of our method, we carry out some simulations. In addition, we investigate two types of adaptation mechanisms, and try to evolve the proposed artificial immune network using reinforcement signals.