Artificial Intelligence and Soft Computing

Abstract

As the number of handicapped people increases worldwide, Intelligent Wheelchairs (IW) are becoming the solution to enable a higher degree of independence for wheelchair users. In addition, IW Projects relevance is increasing, mainly in the fields of robotics and safety-related systems due to their inherent and still unresolved problems related with environment uncertainty, safe communications and collaboration methodologies. This paper describes the development of new communication system, based on multi-agent systems (MAS) methodologies and motivated by Intelligent Wheelchair systems, as a mean to enable fault-tolerant communications in open transmission systems and as an agent collaboration enabler. It provides an overview of the related work, the background and the main constraints to system development. It proposes and discusses a new communication model, based on messages, for multi-agent systems, that tackles the problems that exist in a dynamic and uncertain environment in the field of mobile robotics. The achieved results enable us to conclude on the effectiveness of the proposed comunication model and its adequacy to the field of mobile robots in dynamic environments while establishing a comparison with a commonly used Multi-Agent Platform, JADE. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.