Cooperation of visually guided behaviors

The authors present modeling, analysis, and synthesis of visual behaviors of agents engaged in navigational tasks. They consider situations in which two agents can navigate independently or in cooperation. For the purpose of modeling the behaviors, a formalism is adopted from the discrete events systems (DES) theory that is suitable for investigating control-theoretic issues of a system. The focus is on the identification of elementary behaviors and their composition, leading to more complex behaviors. Two kinds of elementary behaviors are identified: one where observations are directly connected with actions, and one where observations and actions are either received or transmitted. The use of the DES formalism allows synthesis of complex behaviors in a systematic fashion and guarantees their controllability