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8 Multi-agents
Chapter Objectives:
Define the types of control regimes, cooperation strategies, and goals in multi-
agents.
Given a description of an intended task, a collection of robots, and the
permitted interactions between robots, design a multi-agent system and
describe the system in terms of heterogeneity, control, cooperation, and
goals.
Compute the social entropy of a team.
Be able to program a set of homogeneous reactive robots to accomplish a
foraging task.
Describe use of social rules and internal motivation for emergent societal
behavior.
8.1 Overview
This chapter explores artificial intelligence methods for coordinating and
controlling collections of mobile robots working on completing a task. Col-
lections of two or more mobile robots working together are often referred to
SOCIETIES as teams or societies of multiple mobile robots, or more concisely multi-agents.
MULTI-AGENTS Multi-agent teams are desirable for many reasons. In the case of planetary
explorers or removing land mines, more robots should be able to cover more
area. Like ants and other insects, many cheap robots working together could
replace a single expensive robot, making multi-agents more cost effective.
SWARM ROBOTS Indeed, the term swarm robots is becoming popular to refer to large numbers