Method for generating of global cooperation based on local communication

Abstract

This paper proposes a method for generating cooperative behaviors among distributed autonomous robots based on local communications. In general, each robot can not communicate with all of the other robots when there are many robots in the environment. In order to cope with its problem, each robot should use local communication. However, it is difficult to make cooperation such as task sharing because each robot can not obtain the information of a whole group. In this paper, we describe a method to solve the problem. By using the method, an operator can conduct a group of robots to desired task sharing even if they use local communication. We studied an appropriate area size of local communication for robots. If the area is too small, each robot may not be able to cooperate with the other robots, because each robot doesn't have enough information. In order to find an appropriate area size of local communication, we carried out simulations. And we confirmed that the area size is not changed even if the number of robots is changed. After that, we performed simulation experiments to study the effectiveness of proposed method. In the simulations, we confirmed that robots could share task depending on commands from an operator.