Chidori – a bio-inspired cognitive architecture for collective robotics applications

A cognitive collaborative multi-agent control architecture that addresses real-world control problems for swarms of mobile robots is proposed. The swarm's emergent behaviour is obtained by using a distributed Particle Swarm Optimization inspired algorithm. A swarm-user interface is also presented and offers a way for a human operator to interact with and guide the robotic swarm without limiting its emergent intelligence. The architecture is designed as a multi-agent system developed using JADE Framework. Three types of agents were defined: local behaviour agent, social behaviour agent and graphical user interface (GUI) agent. Each robot is associated with a pair of a local and a social behaviour agents which implement the reactive component and the interaction between the robots. The swarm forms a hierarchical structure composed of subswarms and neighbourhoods based on tasks and goals defined by the user or the swarm itself. The GUI agent is used as a link between the human expert and the swarm. The architecture was tested on a swarm of e-puck robots.