A Physically Grounded Approach to Coordinate Movements in a Team1

1 Copyright 2002 IEEE. Published in the Proc. Of the 1st International Workshop on Mobile Teamwork, Vienna (A), July 2002.. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works, must be obtained from the IEEE. Contact: Manager, Copyrights and Permissions / IEEE Service Center / 445 Hoes Lane / P.O. Box 1331 / Piscataway, NJ 08855-1331, USA. Telephone: + Intl. 732-562-3966. Abstract This paper focuses on the problems of coordinating the movements of a cooperative team in an environment, and proposes an approach that takes inspiration from the laws of physics. Our idea is to have the movements of team members driven by abstract force fields, generated by team members themselves (i.e., by carriedon devices) and propagated via some embedded infrastructure (or by team members in an ad-hoc way). A globally coordinated and self-organized behavior in team members’ movements emerges due to the interrelated effects of team members following the shape of the fields and of dynamic fields re-shaping. A case study in the area of warehouse management is introduced to exemplify the proposed approach.