Many hands make light work? An investigation into behaviourally controlled co-operant autonomous mobile robots

The past ten years has seen a flurry of research activity into the behavioural control of autonomous mobile robots. Yet despite this effort, many researchers are of the opinion that behavioural robots are incapable of achieving tasks more complex than simple can collecting, box pushing, herding or moving in formation. If such robots are to gain industrial credibility, these criticisms must be addressed. To focus the research we have studied the application of multiple mobile robots to a complex nuclear plant decommissioning problem. We argue that it is possible for multiple mobile robots to co-operatively perform a complex task provided that solutions to a number of key issues are incorporated into a behavioural control architecture. These include: behaviour conflict resolution, behaviour adaptation and behaviour scheduling. We have designed behavioural control methods to address these issues and our work has resulted in the creation of a behaviour synthesis architecture (BSA) which ha..