Intelligent Inhabited Environments: Cooperative Robotics & Buildings

Abstract

In this paper we describe an innovative multi-agent environment consisting of an Intelligent-Building (IB) inhabited by a variety of agents ranging from mobile robots, embedded-agents to people some of which carry smart wearable gadgets. These cooperate together to form what we term an intelligent inhabited environment. We discuss the high-level multi embedded-agent model, explaining how it facilitates inter-agent communication and cooperation between heterogeneous sets of agents. We present an application aimed at establishing an agent based care/rehabilitation system in which a collection of building and robot agents cooperates to care for human occupants. The technological basis of our solutions stem from a genetic-fuzzy technique that has already been developed and successfully applied to the control of autonomous outdoor vehicles. We discuss in detail how we might use this system to identify significant variations from normal behaviour or identify emergency situations in which specialised robots might be summoned to assist. Finally we report results from earlier experiments on autonomous mobile robot navigation and embeddedagent based environment control in intelligent buildings. 1. Vision