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Dynamic Self-Configuration of an Ecology of Robots
R. Lundh, L. Karlsson and A. Saffiotti
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Abstract
There is a tendency today toward the study of distributed systems
consisting of many heterogeneous, networked, cooperating robotic
devices. We refer to a system of this type as an ecology of
robots. We call functional configuration of this ecology a way
to allocate and connect functionalities among its robots. In general,
the same ecology can perform different tasks by using different
configuration. Moreover, the same task can often be solved using
different configurations, and which is the best one depends on the
available resources. This potential flexibility of a robot ecology is
reduced by the fact that, in most current approaches, configurations are
pre-programmed by hand. In this paper, we propose a plan-based approach
to automatically generate a preferred configuration of a robot ecology
given a task, environment, and set of resources. In contrast to
previous approaches, the state of the ecology is automatically acquired
at planning time, and it is monitored during execution in order to
reconfigure if a functionality fails. We illustrate these ideas on a
specific instance of an ecology of robots, called PEIS Ecology. We also
show an experiment run on our PEIS Ecology testbed, in which a robot
needs to reconfigure when the original configuration fails.
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