Abstract
Collaborative robotic systems have much to gain by leveraging results from the area of multi-agent systems and in particular agent-oriented software engineering. Agent-oriented software engineering has much to gain by using collaborative robotic systems as a testbed. In this article, we propose and specify a formally grounded generic collaborative system shell for robotic systems and human operated ground control systems. Collaboration is formalized in terms of the concept of delegation and delegation is instantiated as a speech act. Task Specification Trees are introduced as both a formal and pragmatic characterization of tasks and tasks are recursively delegated through a delegation process implemented in the collaborative system shell. The delegation speech act is formally grounded in the implementation using Task Specification Trees, task allocation via auctions and distributed constraint problem solving. The system is implemented as a prototype on Unmanned Aerial Vehicle systems and a case study targeting emergency service applications is presented.
This work is partially supported by grants from the Swedish Research Council (VR) Linnaeus Center CADICS, VR grant 90385701, the ELLIIT Excellence Center at Linköping-Lund for Information Technology, NFFP5-The Swedish National Aviation Engineering Research Program, and the Center for Industrial Information Technology CENIIT.
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Doherty, P., Heintz, F., Landén, D. (2011). A Delegation-Based Architecture for Collaborative Robotics. In: Weyns, D., Gleizes, MP. (eds) Agent-Oriented Software Engineering XI. AOSE 2010. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6788. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-22636-6_13
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