Multi-robot team formation control in the GUARDIANS project

Purpose The GUARDIANS multi-robot team is to be deployed in a large warehouse in smoke. The team is to assist firefighters search the warehouse in the event or danger of a fire. The large dimensions of the environment together with development of smoke which drastically reduces visibility, represent major challenges for search and rescue operations. The GUARDIANS robots guide and accompany the firefighters on site whilst indicating possible obstacles and the locations of danger and maintaining communications links. Design/methodology/approach In order to fulfill the aforementioned tasks the robots need to exhibit certain behaviours. Among the basic behaviours are capabilities to stay together as a group, that is, generate a formation and navigate while keeping this formation. The control model used to generate these behaviours is based on the so-called social potential field framework, which we adapt to the specific tasks required for the GUARDIANS scenario. All tasks can be achieved without central control, and some of the behaviours can be performed without explicit communication between the robots. Findings The GUARDIANS environment requires flexible formations of the robot team: the formation has to adapt itself to the circumstances. Thus the application has forced us to redefine the concept of a formation. Using the graph-theoretic terminology, we can say that a formation may be stretched out as a path or be compact as a star or wheel. We have implemented the developed behaviours in simulation environments as well as on real ERA-MOBI robots commonly referred to as Erratics. We discuss advantages and shortcomings of our model, based on the simulations as well as on the implementation with a team of Erratics.</p

Applications of negotiation theory to water issues

The purpose of the paper is to review the applications of non-cooperative bargaining theory to water related issues – which fall in the category of formal models of negotiation. The ultimate aim is that of, on the one hand, identify the conditions under which agreements are likely to emerge, and their characteristics; and, on the other hand, to support policy makers in devising the “rules of the game” that could help obtain a desired result. Despite the fact that allocation of natural resources, especially of trans-boundary nature, has all the characteristics of a negotiation problem, there are not many applications of formal negotiation theory to the issue. Therefore, this paper first discusses the noncooperative bargaining models applied to water allocation problems found in the literature. Particular attention will be given to those directly modelling the process of negotiation, although some attempts at finding strategies to maintain the efficient allocation solution will also be illustrated. In addition, this paper will focus on Negotiation Support Systems (NSS), developed to support the process of negotiation. This field of research is still relatively new, however, and NSS have not yet found much use in real life negotiation. The paper will conclude by highlighting the key remaining gaps in the literature.Negotiation theory, Bragaining, Coalitions, Fairness, Agreements

Applications of Negotiation Theory to Water Issues

The purpose of the paper is to review the applications of non-cooperative bargaining theory to water related issues – which fall in the category of formal models of negotiation. The ultimate aim is that to, on the one hand, identify the conditions under which agreements are likely to emerge, and their characteristics; and, on the other hand, to support policy makers in devising the “rules of the game” that could help obtain a desired result. Despite the fact that allocation of natural resources, especially of trans-boundary nature, has all the characteristics of a negotiation problem, there are not many applications of formal negotiation theory to the issue. Therefore, this paper first discusses the non-cooperative bargaining models applied to water allocation problems found in the literature. Particular attention will be given to those directly modelling the process of negotiation, although some attempts at finding strategies to maintain the efficient allocation solution will also be illustrated. In addition, this paper will focus on Negotiation Support Systems (NSS), developed to support the process of negotiation. This field of research is still relatively new, however, and NSS have not yet found much use in real life negotiation. The paper will conclude by highlighting the key remaining gaps in the literature.Negotiation theory, Water, Agreeements, Stochasticity, Stakeholders

Artificial Intelligence and Systems Theory: Applied to Cooperative Robots

This paper describes an approach to the design of a population of cooperative robots based on concepts borrowed from Systems Theory and Artificial Intelligence. The research has been developed under the SocRob project, carried out by the Intelligent Systems Laboratory at the Institute for Systems and Robotics - Instituto Superior Tecnico (ISR/IST) in Lisbon. The acronym of the project stands both for "Society of Robots" and "Soccer Robots", the case study where we are testing our population of robots. Designing soccer robots is a very challenging problem, where the robots must act not only to shoot a ball towards the goal, but also to detect and avoid static (walls, stopped robots) and dynamic (moving robots) obstacles. Furthermore, they must cooperate to defeat an opposing team. Our past and current research in soccer robotics includes cooperative sensor fusion for world modeling, object recognition and tracking, robot navigation, multi-robot distributed task planning and coordination, including cooperative reinforcement learning in cooperative and adversarial environments, and behavior-based architectures for real time task execution of cooperating robot teams

A robot swarm assisting a human fire-fighter

Emergencies in industrial warehouses are a major concern for fire-fighters. The large dimensions, together with the development of dense smoke that drastically reduces visibility, represent major challenges. The GUARDIANS robot swarm is designed to assist fire-fighters in searching a large warehouse. In this paper we discuss the technology developed for a swarm of robots assisting fire-fighters. We explain the swarming algorithms that provide the functionality by which the robots react to and follow humans while no communication is required. Next we discuss the wireless communication system, which is a so-called mobile ad-hoc network. The communication network provides also the means to locate the robots and humans. Thus, the robot swarm is able to provide guidance information to the humans. Together with the fire-fighters we explored how the robot swarm should feed information back to the human fire-fighter. We have designed and experimented with interfaces for presenting swarm-based information to human beings