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TEAMBOTICA: a robotic framework for integrated teaming, tasking, networking, and control

Régis Vincent, Pauline Berry, Andrew Agno, Charlie Ortiz, David Wilkins
SRI International
333 Ravenswood Ave
Menlo Park, CA 94025

{vincent, berry, agno, ortiz, wilkins}@ai.sri.com

Abstract:

TEAMBOTICA is a research environment for the exploration of theories, designs and implementations of team-based robotics. In developing TEAMBOTICA, we found that many of the simplifying assumptions that are often taken in both multiagent systems and behavior-based robotics had to be discarded. Central to our approach is a multilevel agent architecture which is adaptive along a number of dimensions and which is based on a vertically integrated design that spans a wide range of operations, from team-level reasoning to low-level control. The design addresses a number of pertinent issues: the proper mix of deliberation and action, flexible networking support including planning for communications, adaptive task level control, team-based monitoring, and an open systems modularity that takes form-factor considerations seriously. We also describe simulation tools for development and discuss several robotic teams that we have demonstrated.

lessons learned from deployed agents,autonomous robots and robot teams