Emergent Cooperative Behavior for Multirobot Systems

Individual's behavior inside a multirobot is inherently unpredictable because the global behavior of the whole system relies on local interactions among group members. The configuration of the environment, namely robot's relative positions inside the group, plays a crucial role in satisfying the global goal. We have introduced a set of macroscopic parameters that allow to evaluate the evolution of the multirobot system. They depend on both the global goal and the environment dynamics providing a form of implicit communication among the robots. Thus, robots communicate implicitly their intention to be involved in complex actions. Other group members become simply aware of it by recognizing configuration pattern of the environment. An application to simulating football game can be realized by triggering the arbitration mechanism over the whole behavior set to generate as many as possible situations favourable to score a goal

Cooperative behaviors in multi-robot systems through implicit communication

We illustrate the Cooperation through Implicit Communication behavior-based approach used for developing the PaSo-Team (The University of Padua Simulated Soccer Robot Team), a multi-robot software system for soccer robot competitions promoted by the RoboCup Simulation League. The configuration of the environment, namely the robots' relative positions depending on both the global task and the game dynamics, provides a source of implicit information about the robots' intention to be involved in collective actions, making them able to cooperate implicitly. The soccer team performance can be tuned by triggering the arbitration module of any single robot to generate, as many as possible, suitable situations which hint to the team the action of scoring the goal. Some macroscopic parameters can be usefully introduced to evaluate the evolution of the whole multi-robot software system