Cooperative material handling by human and robotic agents: Module development and system synthesis

In this paper we present a collaborative effort to design and implement a cooperative material handling system by a small team of human and robotic agents in an unstructured indoor environment, Our approach makes fundamental use of the human agent's expertise for aspects of task planning, task monitoring and error recovery. Our system is neither fully autonomous nor fully teleoperated. It is designed to make effective use of the human's abilities within the present state of the art of autonomous systems. Our robotic agents refer to systems which are each equipped with at least one sensing modality and which possess some capability for self-orientation and/or mobility. Our robotic agents are not required to be homogeneous with respect to either capabilities or function. Our research stresses both paradigms and testbed experimentation. Theory issues include the requisite coordination principles and techniques which are fundamental to a cooperative multi-agent system's basic functioning. We have constructed an experimental distributed multi-agent architecture testbed facility. The required modular components of this testbed are currently operational and have been tested individually. Our current research focuses on the agent's integration in a scenario for cooperative material handling. Copyright (C) 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd