ALLIANCE: an architecture for fault tolerant, cooperative control of heterogeneous mobile robots

Abstract

This research addresses the problem of achieving fault tolerant cooperation within small- to medium-sized teams of heterogeneous mobile robots. We describe a novel behavior-based, fully distributed architecture, called ALLIANCE, that utilizes adaptive action selection to achieve fault tolerant cooperative control in robot missions involving loosely coupled, largely independent tasks. The robots in this architecture possess a variety of high-level functions that they can perform during a mission, and must at all times select an appropriate action based on the requirements of the mission, the activities of other robots, the current environmental conditions, and their own internal states. The software architecture allows the team members to respond robustly and reliably to unexpected environmental changes and modifications in the robot team that may occur due to mechanical failure, the learning of new skills, or the addition or removal of robots from the team by human intervention. After presenting ALLIANCE, we describe in detail our experimental results of an implementation of this architecture on a team of physical mobile robots performing a cooperative box pushing demonstration.