CONTROLLING MULTIPLE ROBOTS THROUGH LOCALLY ORIENTED POTENTIAL FIELDS

In this work, an intelligent control architecture for controlling multi-robots, denominated ACIn, that integrates planning and RBS, has been proposed. With this objective, some techniques have been investigated for the planning of trajectories, such as Potential Fields and Potential Fields based on the solution of the Boundary Value Problem (BVP). Such techniques, generally used for a single robot, have been adapted to work on multi-robots into ACIn architecture. Then, a modification of the Potential Fields based on BVP, called Locally Oriented Potential Field (LOPF), is used together ACIn to overcome the drawback existing in BVP based techniques, when they are applied for controlling multi robots. To get collaborative interactions among the robots in a team, a rule based system has been also proposed to as part of the ACIn architecture. The objective of RBS is to characterize the functionality of each robot for realizing an specific task. Experiments performed in the robot soccer simulated environment show that ACIn works on satisfactory.