A cooperative multi-robot architecture for moving a paralyzed robot

In this paper we study the possibility of cooperation between reactive and deliberative based robots, which are generally considered as antinomic approaches. We focus on a case study composed, on the one hand, of an “intelligent” robot that submits failures which prevent it from moving, and on the other hand, of a pool of simple autonomous mobile robots which are able to push. The paralyzed robot can broadcast signals to recruit mobile robots and to be pushed by them. These signals are interpreted as force fields by agents in order to compute their reactive behavior. We present these different robot behaviors and analyse two experiments. We show that the proposed system provides a control loop which is independent of the number of robots pushing on each arm, showing that a combination of multi-agent and deliberative architectures can define intelligent and robust multi-robot systems.