Abstract
Agent paradigm is becoming more and more popular in design of complex multi-robot systems. Similarities between features attributed to robots and agents lead to defining an agent as a single robot control program or even calling a robot an “embodied agents”. This approach can cause serious issues concerning scalability, extensibility and performance of large-scale multi-robot systems. In this paper a different approach to design and implementation of software systems managing mobile robots is presented. It is based on the logical separation of a hardware robot and a software agent. The paper focuses on improvements in system performance achieved by using the approach. Three exemplary applications are described and experimental results are provided.
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