Study On Several Issues Of Cooperative Robotics Which Is Based On MAS (Multi-Agent System)

The application mode of robots is changing from cell to system one, which is of the need of practice as well as the evolution trend of robotics. And the theory of cooperative robotics cannot but to become a focus of robotics.Traditional methods to be used to deal with problems of cooperation are mostly from"control"point of views. Robots cooperate just through a kind of process Controller, which integrates into a course unit all levels of information processing and at last give a control signal. Based on a kind of control unit, the system can also accomplish actions in phase. But in fact, because of the amalgamation of cooperation and coordination module with the controller, cooperation & coordination rely excessively on primitive information. This leads to weakening its cooperation & coordination decision-making capability. Moreover, this kind of processing method corresponds precisely to structural programming style.With the development of cooperative robotics, the concept of multi-agent systems is becoming of growing importance, though we lack of an abstract, powerful, homogenous and simple conceptual framework to put them into practice, even more when multi-agent systems involve many components distributed over a wide and uncontrolled network of computers, information and competence. Our idea on dealing with cooperation came into being just under this environment. And in contrast to cybernetic method, our robot has a"mind"named agent, which is an autonomous and human one. Here an agent is actually an expert system on cooperative strategy, of which input material is from knowledge database and its output no longer directly depend on primitive information from sensors. This method is consistent with OOP (Object Oriented Programming) style. And this kind of agent based cooperative robot system is called Multi-Robot Agent System (MRAS). In this thesis we are to discuss a cooperative multi-robot agent systems from the following aspects:Chapter 1 At first, we give an analysis of foregone investigation on Cooperative Robotics. And then we will bring forward and demonstrate the viewpoint that the development tendency of Cooperative Robotics certainly will be combined with MAS. It is an approach to scientific cooperative robotics for us to use the theories and methodologies in MAS for reference. And then we will give a conceptual framework for MAS based cooperative robots system, which is consequently consist with AOP(Agent Oriented Programming) style from the software point of view.Chapter 2 This chapter we will address the problem of the control in distributed artificial systems how to decompose a task into subtasks, which will be allocated to distributed components, and have them cooperate to the solution of the initial problem. The notion of task is an essential component of knowledge based systems theories, so we deals with precise definition of task from the knowledge level point of view. A model framework is presented including a language for the knowledge reasoning. And in the end of this paper, we offered an example to illuminate concepts that were provided by the context. Compared with common Petri Net based method to be used to deal with task decomposing, the former gets rid of intricated time sequence relation exist among sub-tasks. And it has the advantages over compatibility of universality in modeling and multiformity in agent. And then achieves direct communication between task describing and autonomous agent. Furthermore, knowledge based task decomposing makes for easier system hardware designing.Chapter 3 This chapter deals with modeling informally for a social agent under Multi-Robot Agent Systems environment. The main reason for which we develop this modeling work is: the real foundation of all sociality is the individual social action and mind, one cannot reduce action at the collective level to action at the individual level unless one passes through the social character of the individual action. The most important two claims we will propose at first are: (1) Sociality emerges from the interference and dependence relation that presented among agents; (2) Goal-Delegation and Goal-Adoption are the basic ingredients of cooperation and organization. As far as interference and dependence relation be concerned, we expound emphatically the latter (i.e. dependence relation) from the following aspects: its role as the foundation of sociality, its premise and principles as well. Then we will illuminate Goal-Delegation and Goal-Adoption (including their motives and mechanisms). At the end of this chapter, we'll recommend simply the notions of social organization and social structures.Chapter 4 In this chapter, we focus on setting up formal model of belief and its update mechanism. Contents included in this chapter are: formal model of social believes belong to an agent; and belief change mechanism exist in belief machine; and some familiar consequence relations exist between some items of believes and their support belief machines, etc.. All these jobs is for Agent Action Programming which we will be discussed in the next chapter.Chapter 5 In chapter 5, we are going to deal with setting up formal model of Agent Action Programming. We consider an agent as an entia of software code and its semantics container (it represents the semantics of all types of data and functions which construct agent software code) in the context. And we integrate successfully this two kinds of properties into our model. Finally, we let the BWE as an example of cooperation. The result indicates that,compared with negotiation based cooperative system put forward by Sarit Kraus, ours gains an advantage over simplicity and needs less CPU hours.Chapter 6 Chapter 6 is a summarize to this thesis. It includes main jobs done in this Ph. D. thesis and our future improve works.