A Multi-Agent System for Distributed Control of Networked Mobile Robots

The development of the Internet has provided many opportunities for academic and industrial practitioners to reexamine, extend and adapt existing control architectures in novel ways. One of the significant benefits the Internet has provided is the availability of widely accessible, cost-effective and standardised mechanisms for inter-computer communication. Because of this the Internet has allowed the development of globally based distributed computing architectures, allowing in the field of robotics the development of Internet robot systems1 in which remote robot functionality is made available to users anywhere in the world via a standard web-browser. The Internet and development of standardised Internet protocols have not only made global functionality possible, but have also allowed the increased development of smaller scale distributed systems. Internet protocols and networking functionality can be applied to allow reliable, structured, cost-effective communication to be implemented in systems which may previously have relied on bespoke radio-based solutions. During the period in which Internet technologies have developed, increased interest has been shown in robotics to the development and implementation of multiple robot architectures. This is because relative to single robot architectures, multiple robot architectures can allow improved system performance, task enablement, distributed sensing, distributed action at a distance, and fault tolerance2. Internet technologies have also led to increased interest in distributed computing architectures, with recent years seeing in addition to traditional Client/Server, Remote Computation, and Code on Demand Architectures, the development of an additional distributed computing architecture, Mobile Agents. Mobile agents may offer advantages in the structuring of multiple computing and multiple robot architectures. So far, however, little research has been conducted to examine their potential application and potential benefits in this domain. Research we are conducting at the University of Essex is aimed to examine the potential uses and application of mobile agents in the multiple robot domain, specifically within networked multiple robot systems, in which robots can communicate via Internet-based protocols and make use of Internet-based hardware and software. Through this examination we aim to highlight areas in which mobile agents might be effectively applied, and discover the benefits architectural implementations using this distributed computing architecture might provide. This paper is used to describe the current progress of our investigation. The remainder of the paper attempts to highlight areas in which the use of mobile agents in this domain can be beneficial, through a theoretical/practical examination of mobile agents compared to other distributed computing architectures for multiple robot control. The next section introduces a definition for mobile agents, and an execution environment. It also includes a comparison with traditional distributed computing architectures. This is followed by a brief description of a mobile agent/multiple robot development environment. We describe mobile agent based control systems we have developed. Then experimental results are given. Finally we provide some conclusions and a description of future work.