Design of a Multi-Robot Coordination System Using Mobile Agents

A multi-robot coordination system is a topic that has been extensively studied and implemented by the industries and by academia. Typically, the coordination between robots has been controlled from a central server by exchanging messages with robots. This paper presents a different approach, where a task migrates to robots and executes directly on them. This new style of system design is based on a mobile agent system called ActorNet. The original ActorNet system is extended to incorporate the operations of robots. To illustrate its utility, we perform two experiments: a multi-robot dispatching task and a coordinate collection task. The former is a mobile agent code generated by a task planning program running on a server and the latter is manually written code to demonstrate the strength of the proposed approach. With running programs capable of migrating to remote platforms, we show that one can write an intuitive and performant program without having concerns much about the location differences.