An Autonomous Agent System to Simulate a Set of Robots Exploring a Labyrinth

This work presents anapplication of the agent echnology to the simtdation i the robotic domain. A group of robots cooperate with each other to simulate a large surface which as a labyrinth structure. A robot is represented as a specialist agent which as for task to recognize di~erent paths characterizing thisurface. The application s supported bya hybrid and hierarchical architecture model called MAGIQUE I. The interactions between robots are managed by supervisor agents which ave a global vision of the labyrinth. T e explored parts of the labyrinth are hold at a blackboard structure managed by the supervisor. Agents can communicate ither directly by message-passing or indirectly via their supervisor. The paper begins by describing the application and presents different constraints related to the move of the robots. It discusses how the application is implemented in a distributed programming environment and presents also the practical constraints faced in the instantiation of the model. The application addresses also an issue related to the load balancing between robots. Finally, it concludes by investigating a set of issues to explore. Topic Area: Multiagent systems