Integrating spatial and topological navigation in a behaviour-based multi-robot application

According to the behaviour-based philosophy, the structure of an agent’s internal representations of the environment should not be explicitly imposed by the designer; they should be grounded in its sensor-action space. This paper presents a scheme in which the agent’s action selection mechanism gives rise to an integrated spatial and topological navigation and mapping capability. The navigation behaviour emerges from the notion of location feature detectors and homogeneous action selection. The scheme is demonstrated using two autonomous mobile robots in a multi-robot cooperation scenario.