ALLIANCE: An architecture for fault tolerant, cooperative control of heterogeneous mobile robots
This research addresses the problem of achieving fault tolerant cooperation within small- to medium-sized teams of heterogeneous mobile robots. The author describes a novel behavior-based, fully distributed architecture, called ALLIANCE, that utilizes adaptive action selection to achieve fault tolerant cooperative control in robot missions involving loosely coupled, largely independent tasks. The robots in this architecture possess a variety of high-level functions that they can perform during a mission, and must at all times select an appropriate action based on the requirements of the mission, the activities of other robots, the current environmental conditions, and their own internal states. Since such cooperative teams often work in dynamic and unpredictable environments, the software architecture allows the team members to respond robustly and reliably to unexpected environmental changes and modifications in the robot team that may occur due to mechanical failure, the learning of new skills, or the addition or removal of robots from the team by human intervention. After presenting ALLIANCE, the author describes in detail experimental results of an implementation of this architecture on a team of physical mobile robots performing a cooperative box pushing demonstration. These experiments illustrate the ability of ALLIANCE to achieve adaptive, fault-tolerant cooperative control amidst dynamic changes in the capabilities of the robot team.
- Research Organization:
- Oak Ridge National Lab. (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE, Washington, DC (United States); Department of the Navy, Washington, DC (United States)
- DOE Contract Number:
- AC05-84OR21400
- OSTI ID:
- 32500
- Report Number(s):
- CONF-9409306-1; ON: DE95007374; CNN: Contract N00014-86-K-0685; Contract N00014-85-K-0124; TRN: 95:003014
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: IEEE/RSJ/GI international conference on intelligent robots and systems (IROS), Munich (Germany), 12-16 Sep 1994; Other Information: PBD: [1995]
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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