Cooperation Issues and Distributed Sensing for Multi-Robot Systems

Abstract — The paper considers the properties a Multi-Robot System should exhibit to perform an assigned task cooperatively. Our experiments regard specifically the domain of RoboCup Middle-Size League (MSL) competitions. But the illustrated techniques can be usefully applied also to other service robotics fields like, for example, videosurveillance. Two issues are addressed in the paper. The former refers to the problem of dynamic role assignment in a team of robots. The latter concerns the problem of sharing the sensory information to cooperatively track moving objects. Both these problems have been extensively investigated over the past years by the MSL robot teams. In our proposal, each individual robot has been designed to become reactively aware of the environment configuration. In addition, a dynamic role assignment policy among teammates is activated, based on the knowledge about the best behavior that the team is able to acquire through the shared sensorial information. In the experiment section, we present the successful performance of Artisti Veneti robot team at the MSL Challenge competitions of RoboCup-2003 to show the effectiveness of our proposed hybrid architecture, as well as some tests run in laboratory to validate the Omnidirectional Distributed Vision System which allows to share the informations gathered by the omnidirectional cameras of our robots