Multi-robot cooperation through the common use of "mechanisms"

We propose a new approach to treat a class of cooperative issues in the multi-robot context. These issues are associated with the common use of some entities, called mechanisms. A mechanism can be seen as a generalization of the notion of resource. The robots can modify its state directly or through requests. The robots can also share its utilization. Multi-robot cooperation can be expressed as a distributed decisional process that tends to solve, detect and treat resource conflict situations as well as sources of inefficiency. We discuss these issues and illustrate them through a simulated system which allows a number of autonomous robots to plan and perform cooperatively a set of servicing tasks in a hospital environment