Abstract

The paper documents a case study in the design and implementation of a robotic multi-agent system. It illustrates known design guidelines, namely that the physics of the environment must be exploited, that behavior is the result from the interaction dynamics between the agent and the environment, and that emergent behavior can and must be utilised whenever possible. But the case study also challenges certain views, such as the subsumption architecture, the need for an action selection mechanism, the goal-oriented design methodology dominating the literature on planning, and the algorithmic style of writing control programs. Alternatives are explored in the form of a cooperative, parallel, behavior-oriented design. 1 Introduction An autonomous agent is a physical system that has its own resources to operate independently in a dynamically changing real world environment. The resources include energy, computational power, sensors, actuators, and body parts. A multi-agent system is an e...

Citations

712	Intelligence without reason - Brooks - 1991
118	The dynamics of action selection - Maes - 1989
98	The artificial life roots of artificial intelligence - Steels - 1994
63	Motor schema based mobile robot navigation - Arkin - 1989
36	Towards Robot Cooperation - McFarland - 1994
26	Problems of Animal Behaviour - McFarland - 1989
18	Building Agents with Autonomous Behavior Systems - Steels - 1995
15	The PDL reference manual - Steels - 1992
12	Mobile Robots, Inspiration to Implementation. A.K - Flynn - 1993
7	Lego vehicles : a technology for studying intelligent systems - Smithers - 1991
1	Teleo-reactive programs for robot control - Nilsson - 1994