Agent based architecture for multirobot cooperative tasks. Design and applications

Résumé

This thesis focuses on the development of a system in which a team of heterogeneous mobile robots can cooperate to perform a wide range of tasks, In order that a group of heterogeneous robots can cooperate among them, one of the most important parts to develop is the creation of an architecture which gives support for the cooperation. This architecture is developed by means of embedding agents and interfacing agent code with native low-level code. It also addresses the implementation of resource sharing among the whole group of robots, that is, the robots can borrow capabilities from each-other. In order to validate this architecture, that is to check if it is suitable for implementing cooperative tasks, some cooperative applications have been implemented. The first one is an application where a group of robots must cooperate in order to safely navigate through an unknown environment. The second one consists of enabling the team of robots to create a certain formation and navigate maintaining this formation. Finally, in an attempt to facilitate access to the robots of the team and to the information that their accessories provide, a system for the teleoperation of the team has been implemented.