Tailoring an agent architecture to a flexible platform suitable for cooperative robotics

Abstract

Flexibility and adaptability are essential properties of intelligent manufacturing systems. However, it is a major challenge to realize these properties and the benefits of a flexible and adaptable system rarely make up for the expenses imposed by the process of designing and building such a system. The use of a cheap and flexible but yet realistic platform is a necessity if we want to overcome these challenges. In this paper we present a practical use of the hybrid agent architecture InteRRaP and introduce a flexible platform for prototyping multi-agent systems consisting of a heterogeneous set of cooperating robots. We address the transformation of the abstract agent model into a concrete model that obliges the demands of the technological platform and thus supports the implementation of the agent. We finally evaluate on the approach of tailoring an existing architecture to suit a specific application domain and discuss the resulting architecture for our prototype.