A hybrid approach to supervising multiple co-operant autonomous mobile robots

UK Robotics Ltd. have for some time been working in the area of multiple co-operant autonomous mobile robots. While there are a number of applications in the nuclear, chemical and off-shore industries that would benefit from such technology, the required science and engineering is only just beginning to be realised. The key issues are firstly, how to control the interaction of these robots with themselves and their environment? and secondly, how to interact with this group of robots from the point of view of an operator? What has emerged is a novel hybrid architecture that contains a reflective planning agent which is capable of translating high level operator goals into low level behaviour missions that can be executed by multiple autonomous robots. Two real robots have been used as part of our studies and this paper details our hybrid approach and the results obtained so far