Communication in the autonomous and decentralized robot system ACTRESS

The new concept for an advanced robot system, ACTRESS (ACTor-based robots and equipments synthetic system), has been designed for the automation of high level tasks. The system assumes that multiple robots and equipments, which are called robotors in general, work independently or cooperatively by communicating each other, depending on the task requirements. The paper discusses the distributed robot system architecture. The basic design of protocol is shown for the communication between robotors in order to achieve various tasks. The message protocol is extended and the concept of negotiation is introduced as the framework for the cooperative work of the task allocation problem. The message protocol has been applied to object-pushing problem as an example.<>