A Framework for Cognitive Agents

Abstract: We designed a family of completely autonomous mobile robots with local intelligence. Each robot has a number of on-board sensors, including vision, and does not rely on global sensor systems. The on-board embedded controller is sufficient to analyze several low-resolution color images per second. This enables our robots to perform several complex tasks such as navigation, map generation, or intelligent group behavior. Not being limited to the game of soccer and being completely autonomous, we are looking at a number of interesting scenarios. Robots can communicate with each other, e.g. for exchanging positions, findings of objects or just the local states they are currently in (e.g. sharing their current goals with other robots in the group). We are interested in the differences between a behavior-based approach versus a traditional control algorithm at this still very low level of action