Cooperation Issues and Distributed Sensing for Multirobot Systems These soccer-playing robots can cooperate and change roles as needed, and their 360 degree vision can be combined into team-wide observations.
Enrico Pagello, Antonio D’Angelo, Emanuele Menegatti · 2006
This paper considers the properties a multirobot system should exhibit to perform an assigned task coopera- tively. Our experiments regard specifically the domain of RoboCup middle-size league (MSL) competitions. But the illustrated techniques can be usefully applied also to other service robotics fields like, for example, videosurveillance. Two issues are addressed in the paper. The former refers to the problem of dynamic role assignment in a team of robots. The latter concerns the problem of sharing the sensory information to cooperatively track moving objects. Both these problems have been extensively investigated over the past years by the MSL robot teams. In our paper, each individual robot has been designed to become reactively aware of the environment configuration. In addition, a dynamic role assignment policy among teammates is activated, based on the knowledge about the best behavior that the team is able to acquire through the shared sensorial information. We present the successful performance of the Artisti Veneti robot team at the MSL Challenge competitions of RoboCup-2003 to show the effec- tiveness of our proposed hybrid architecture, as well as some tests run in laboratory to validate the omnidirectional distrib- uted vision system which allows us to share the information gathered by the omnidirectional cameras of our robots.