Building Complex Systems with Agent-Space Architecture

Building complex systems requires a specific kind of modularity as well as incremental development. Here we introduce an architecture where basic modules are reactive agents and the data exchange among them is based on the so-called stigmergic communication through space. In this way we have connected ideas coming from the multi-agent systems and the coordination languages on the one side and ideas of the behavior-based systems on the other side. We demonstrate that this architecture manifests several interesting features which are useful for engineering of real-time systems and modeling of biological creatures or their parts. We advocate for so-called purely reactive agents which are stateless entities usually taken as too weak building blocks of systems. However, their features enable us to use a special method of incremental development (so-called subsumption method)

BUILDING CONTROL SYSTEM OF MOBILE ROBOT WITH AGENT-SPACE ARCHITECTURE Abstract

Agent-Space architecture was proposed for building of complex systems [8]. According to this architecture, a control system is implemented as a set of reactive agents which communicate indirectly through another entity called space. It is derived from subsumption architecture and related philosophy of R. Brooks and M. Minsky but it employs terms of modern approach of multi-agent systems. However, agents do not represent cooperating robots here, but units of a control system of a single robot. The presented architecture can be considered as an application of agent-oriented programming in domain of mobile robotics. Its most interesting features are dataflow which supports a many:many relationship, implicit sampling, high ability to modify and abilit

Building Complex Systems With Agent-Space Architecture

Building complex systems requires a specific kind of modularity as well as incremental development. Here we introduce an architecture where basic modules are reactive agents and the data exchange among them is based on the so-called stigmergic communication through space. In this way we have connected ideas coming from the multi-agent systems and the coordination languages on the one side and ideas of the behavior based systems on the other side. We demonstrate that this architecture manifests several interesting features which are useful for engineering of real-time systems and modeling of biological creatures or their parts. We advocate for so-called purely reactive agents which are stateless entities usually taken as too week building blocks of systems. However, their features enable us to use a special method of incremental development (so-called subsumption method). Keywords: (purely) reactive agent, space, stigmergic communication, incremental development, subsumption, multi-agent systems

Computing and Informatics, Vol. 23, 2004, 1001--1036

Building complex systems requires a specific kind of modularity as well as incremental development. Here we introduce an architecture where basic modules are reactive agents and the data exchange among them is based on the so-called stigmergic communication through space. In this way we have connected ideas coming from the multi-agent systems and the coordination languages on the one side and ideas of the behavior-based systems on the other side. We demonstrate that this architecture manifests several interesting features which are useful for engineering of real-time systems and modeling of biological creatures or their parts. We advocate for so-called purely reactive agents which are stateless entities usually taken as too weak building blocks of systems. However, their features enable us to use a special method of incremental development (so-called subsumption method). Keywords: (purely) reactive agent, space, stigmergic communication, incremental development, subsumption, multi-agent systems

Using Robotnačka in Research and Education

In the previous years, a robot turtle Robotnačka (Ďurina et.al., 2006) has been designed by an enthusiastic group of students, researchers and engineers of Robotika.SK. Several prototypes have been produced and some of them were installed in the Remotely-accessible robotics laboratory (Petrovič et.al., 2006). Pupils, students and other Internet users from around the world can connect to the robots that are on-line most of the time and control them to perform experiments. The purpose of the robots and the laboratory is to provide a creative educational platform suitable for various projects from those that could be integrated into primary or secondary schools curricula through college and university student exercises to research projects in robot navigation, control, or artificial intelligence. First studies into how the robot could be used in the secondary school classes of mathematics, physics, and informatics have been performed earlier (Petrovič, 2006). This work takes our experiences further in three different ways. Firstly, we have implemented Evolve with Imagine, a software package for running evolutionary experiments in Imagine Logo. Thanks to the possibility to steer the robots directly from Imagine, we can evolve robot behaviours using our package. In addition, this software package can serve as a motivating introduction to evolutionary computation for interested students at secondary school level. Secondly, we have designed a set of student exercises for the course on Mobile Robotics at Faculty o