Social roles for taskability in robot teams

Abstract

This paper demonstrates the use of social roles to enable taskability in multi-robot teams based on a study of roles from the social sciences as well as related work in software agents. It first provides a survey of the current state of role- based robotics. Then, it offers specific examples of how roles can enable behavior with a team of heterogeneous robots using the Distributed Field Robot Architecture to integrate with a cognitive agent. The implementation extends the robot persona, previously utilized for allocating resources within a distributed robot team, and constructs a context adapter to allow each robot to assume a role as directed by the cognitive agent.