Control Architecture for Cooperative Mobile Robots using Multi-Agent based Coordination Approach

This paper is about a Multi-Agent based solution to control and coordinate team-working mobile robots moving in unstructured environments. Two main contributions are considered in our approach. The first contribution of this paper is about the Multi-Agents System to Control and Coordinate teAmworking Robots (MAS2CAR) architecture, a new architecture to control a group of coordinated autonomous robots in unstructured environments. MAS2CAR covers three main layers: (i) the Physical Layer (ii) the Control Layer and (iii) the Coordination Layer. The second contribution of this paper is about the multi-agent system (MAS) organisational models aiming to solve the key cooperation issues in the coordination layer, the software components designed based on Utopia a MAS framework which automatically build software agents, thanks to a multi-agent based organisational model called Moise . We provide simulation results that exhibit robotics cooperative behavior related to our scenario, such as multi-robots navigation in presence of obstacles (including trajectory planning, and reactive aspects) via a hybrid control.