Intelligent MAS in System Engineering and Robotics

The concept of agent has been successfully used in a wide range of applications such as Robotics, e-commerce, agent-assisted user training, military transport or health-care. The origin of this concept can be located in 1977, when Carl Hewitt proposed the idea of an interactive object called actor. This actor was defined as a computational agent, which has a mail address and a behaviour (Hewitt, 1977). Actors receive messages from other actors and carry out their tasks in a concurrent way. It is difficult that a single agent could be sufficient to carry out a relatively complex task. The usual approach consists of a society of agents called Multiagent Systems (MAS) -, which communicate and collaborate among them and they are coordinated when pursuing a goal. The purpose of this chapter is to analyze the aspects related to the application of MAS to System Engineering and Robotics, focusing on those approaches that combine MAS with other Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques.