Towards detached communication for robot cooperation

Sammanfattning: This licentiate thesis deals with communication among cooperating mobile robots. Up untilrecently, most robotics research has focused on developing single robots that should accomplish acertain task. Now, it looks like we have come to a point where the need for multiple, cooperatingrobots is increasing since there are certain things that simply are not possible to do with a singlerobot. The major reasons, as described in this thesis, that make the use of multiple robotsparticularly interesting are distribution (it may be impossible to be in two places at the same time),parallelism (major speed improvements can be achieved by using many robots simultaneously),and simplicity (several, individually simpler, robots might be more feasible than a single, morecomplex robot). The field of cooperative robotics is multi-faceted, integrating a number of distinctfields such as social sciences, life sciences, and engineering. As a consequence of this, there areseveral sub-areas within cooperative robotics that can be identified and these are subsequentlydescribed here as well. To achieve coordinated behaviour within a multi-robot teamcommunication can be used to ease the necessity of individual sensing (because of, for instance,calculation complexity), and with respect to this two different explicit approaches have beenidentified. As the survey presented here shows, the first of these approaches has already beenextensively investigated, whereas the amount of research covering the second approach within thedomain of adaptive multi-robot systems has been very limited. This second path is chosen andpreliminary experiments are presented that indicate the usefulness of more complexrepresentations to accomplish cooperation. More specifically, this licentiate thesis presents initialexperiments that will serve as a starting point where the role and relevance of the ability tocommunicate using detached representations in planning and communication about future actionsand events will be studied. Here, an unsupervised classifier is found to have the basiccharacteristics needed to initiate future investigations. Furthermore, two projects are presented thatin particular serve to support future research; a robot simulator and an extension turret for remotecontrol and monitoring of a physical, mobile robot. Detailed descriptions of planned futureinvestigations are also discussed for the subsequent PhD work.