Toward a Robot Architecture Integrating Cooperation between Mobile Robots: Application to Indoor Environment

This article describes an architecture for cooperative and au tonomous mobile robots. The architecture is composed of three levels: functional, control, and planner levels. The functional and control levels manage robot resources, while the planner level carries out complex operations such as planning and cooperation. The cooperation is composed of two phases: (1) collabora tion, in which a task is decomposed into subtasks and subtasks are allocated through a set of robots; and (2) coordination, in which robots actually coordinate their activities to fulfill the initial task using the notion of coordinated protocols. Moreover, a language has been developed to program the coordination. This architecture exhibits important benefits such as (1) mod ularity (the robot can work autonomously or within a team), (2) robustness (although some modules on the robot fail, it is still able to perform useful tasks), and (3) programmability. Two actual examples using two indoor mobile robots are described to demonstrate the interest of this approach.