Fusion of social laws and super rules for coordinating the motion of mobile robots

Abstract

A group of autonomous agents can agree on a set of "social laws" in advance in order to reduce the complexity of conflict resolution later in the field when they are dispatched to achieve the given task. However, it is conceivable that under certain situations, the agents may have to violate the social laws to carry out the task more efficiently or even survive in the field. We thus consider the issue of fusing the social laws and a set of "super rules" for handling exceptions in the context of dynamic path planning for a group of autonomous mobile robots. We report some results that indicate that a fusion of social laws and super rules can help us to design effective algorithms.