Behavioral control of robot teams

This paper discusses the modeling and control of fully autonomous and semi-autonomous robots, operating individually or as teams, in a behavioral context. The recent developments in networking technologies foster the use of teams of robots in a variety of applications, e.g., surveillance and rescueing. Additionally, the inclusion of human agents in a team of robots raises relevant questions on the modeling of human-robot interactions. To fully explore the potential of robot teams these interactions must be accounted for at multiple stages in the design of a robot control architecture. The paper presents a behavioral paradigm for the control of robots supported on basic concepts from nonsmooth calculus. The paradigm develops into a standard two layer hybrid architecture encompassing basic motion primitives and supervision. This approach allows the representation of semantic concepts, a key issue in human-robot interactions, in a natural way by shaping goal regions for the robots to reach in their configuration spaces. Robot teams are handled by extending the supervision layer, designed for each robot, to account for the interactions among teammates.