Abstract
In this paper, we propose a novel method of supporting a specific user in the network connected multi-robot environment. We detach a robot brain from the robot body and make it an autonomous entity “Agent”. One unique software agent exclusively interacts with the user, obtains the robots dynamically and support the user physically with control of these robots. An agent obtains only necessary robots and when those are not needed, the agent releases the robots to make them available by the other agents. With a personal agent approach, the user gets supported consistently in the long term. An agent gets sensory information from the robots obtained and observes the user continuously and reorganizes the robots to follow the user in the real world. To reduce traffic and delay on the network, an agent traverses the network and always resides in the center of the controlled robots. We realized this robot environment using the distributed objects technology and the mobile agent technology. We describe the validity of the proposed method, the detailed mechanism and the experimental results using real robots.
