An Agent Based Software Architecture For Teams Of Robots
Dec, 2003
This report describes an Agent Based Software Architecture for Teams of
Robots. The described tool provides support for task design, task
planning, task execution, task coordination and task analysis for a multi- robot system.
Agent Based Architecture. [250 KB]
Land Vehicle Research: Topological Navigation
Dec, 2003
This web page addresses the development in Localization, Mapping and Features
Extraction concerning the Rescue Project Land Vehicle:
http://lrm.isr.ist.utl.pt/rescue
Vision Based Control of an Autonomous Blimp
Sep, 2003
This report describes the work done in the final year project VideoBlimp:
Blimp [1,55 MB]
Project Reference Scenario
Sep 18, 2001
After thorough scientific discussions, including the plenary presentation
of current research issues on Multi-Agent Systems Architectures, Outdoors
Navigation, Robot Vision and Task Design and Coordination, which helped the
different groups sharing a common language, a scenario, different from the
original project proposal has
been approved as the project reference scenario.
Animation [30Mb]
The reference scenario consists of two robots:
- one aerial blimp/zeppelin robot;
- one land outdoors robot.
The aerial robot will perform several tasks, such as making a visual
topological map of the destroyed site. The map will include information
on the relevance of each of the mapped locations concerning degree of
destruction, presence of victims, etc, as well as on the difficulty of
traversing regions between them, due to the presence of debris or
obstructed paths. The map will be stored as a graph and will be used to
choose the best path for the land robot to reach a goal location (e.g.,
one with a larger number of victoms). It can also be used to help the
aerial robot navigating.
The land robot will use several sensors (GPS, inertial, vision, sonars)
to navigate towards the goal,
handling the details associated to the path (e.g., debris, trees, people
on the way, etc).
Many other tasks can be performed together by the two robots interactively,
such as one robot guiding the other to a specific location, one robot
recharging the other or bringing tools that may be required, etc. Considering
the long term goals of the project, this requires a software architecture
capable of handling a real-time distributed control and supervision systems,
as well as a task coordination architecture to handle the decisions on
which subtasks to dispatch at every time step, so as to optimize the performance
in terms of time taken, reliability, cost, utility or other factors.
The Portuguese company
IdMind
has just finished setting up the
RWI's ATRV-Jr robot we
plan to use as the
land robot, equipped with GPS, inertial navigation sensors and a compass.
SRI/32546/99-00.
