Agent-based mobile robots navigation framework

Abstract

The problem of mobile robot navigation has received a noticeable attention over last few years. Several different approaches were presented, each having major limitations. In this paper a new, agent-based solution the problem of mobile robots navigation is proposed. It is based on a novel representation of the environment, that divides it into a number of distinct regions, and assigns autonomous software Space Agents to supervise it. Space Agents create a graph, that represents a high-level structure of the entire environment. The graph is used as a virtual space, that robot controlling agents work in. The most important features of the approach are: path planning for multiple robots based on most recent data available in the system, automated collision avoidance, simple localization of a "lost robot" and unrestricted scalability. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.