An architecture for distributed cooperative-planning in a behaviour-based multi-robot system

Abstract

The Architecture for Behaviour-Based Agents (ABBA) is an architecture designed to illustrate that situated agents can exhibit sophisticated planning while retaining reactivity, without resorting to hybrid architectures. In particular, unified planning for spatial and topological navigation, cooperation and communication can be achieved using an appropriate action selection scheme. Joint-planning of cooperative behaviour in a multi-robot system arises as a natural consequence of considering cooperative planning as an extension of the action selection problem facing individual agents. This paper describes ABBA and illustrates the efficacy of our approach by presenting a solution to a cooperative cleaning task with two autonomous mobile robots.