Towards Quantification of the need to Cooperate between Robots

Abstract

Collaborative technologies and reasoning strategies gain prominence with the growth in multi-agent systems, ubiquitous sensor systems and ubiquitous computing. This paper establishes the existence of a cooperative phase during real-time navigation of mobile robots where collision conflicts can be resolved only through a resort to some kind of negotiation and understanding between the robots involved. The effect of varying robot parameters on the cooperative phase is presented and the increase in requirement for cooperation with the scaling up of number of robots in a system is also illustrated.