A perspective on teams of robots
De Fen Shen, Beverly Park Woolf · Proceedings of the 17th conference on ACM Annual Computer Science Conference · 1989
Teams of (TOR) is a promising research topic of computer science that is currently attracting attention from research computer scientists. A TOR explores how to organize two or more robots into one team, to enable them to cooperate with each other and to make them adapt to their environment and respond to changes in their world. A special Team of Robots which has a time-constraint in the cooperation procedure is called a Real-Time TOR.Research on TOR results from advances in Distributed Systems and Artificial Intelligence. This large scale system is based on technology derived from the fields of robotics, distributed operating systems, distributed problem solving, large scale system theory, mechanical engineering and communication engineering.Different TORs might use different approaches to share the world. According to this view, we classify TORs into three model types.• World-Independent TOR In the world-independent TOR, each robot is related only to its own world and cooperates only in a limited way with other robots. In this model, the action of robot i can only change the world i. The change of world i does not directly affect the world j. The advantage of this model is that it is easy to implement and its disadvantage is that it is not very powerful.• World-Shared TORIn the World-Shared model, all robots within a TOR are connected to a shared world. If the action of robot (i) changes the world, then that change will affect the action plan of the other robots in the same TOR. Since all robots share the same world, their ability to affect that world is much greater than that of a single robot. The disadvantage is that the implementation is much more complicated and cooperative action needs to be synchronized to avoid conflicts.• Partially-Shared World TORThis model is between the World-Independent and the World-Shared Models.A node model for a TOR describes the software architecture of the individual robots in a TOR. The node model is hierarchical, and includes three levels of modules which are relatively independent of each other. Communication between two modules is only through interface commands between them. The top level module in each robot is the TOR Control Program Module. It is in charge of controlling the local robot's cooperation with other robots in the TOR. The middle-level module is the kernel of a distributed operating system(DOS) and the bottom-level modules include various function subsystems. DOS schedules the processes of both the top-level application programs and the bottom-level subsystems.The potential application, the communication subsystem, and the high level control and cooperation in TOR are discussed in detail in this paper.Many applications await the early appearance of the Team of Robots in the computer world marketplace. TOR must be fault-tolerant, difference-tolerant and uncertainty-tolerant. To implement a TOR, the distributed robot research group must include computer scientists (in both systems and AI fields), communication engineers, mechanical engineers, and anthropologists.