Integrating Robotic Sensor and Effector Capabilities with Multi-Agent Organizations

摘要

Robots possess many effectors and sensors of various capability. It is often difficult, not only to integrate these numerous capabilities, but also to organize them to accomplish a set of goals or tasks. Even more difficult is how to reorganize on the condition that a sensor/effector is damaged or incapacitated during operation. In this paper, we show how a organization-based multi-agent system (OMAS) adapts to control the sensor and effectors within a robot. The OMAS can also be extended to model the sensor and effectors for a team of cooperative robots. The use of integrating sensors/effectors via a OMAS will produce a self-reorganizing, fault tolerant control architecture capable of allowing a robot, or a team of robots, to overcome obstacles and faults within dynamic domains where sensor and effector failure rates may be high. Another positive effect of an OMAS is simplification of system complexity where a non-trivial number of sensors and effectors exist.