Practical multi-robot applications with player and JADE

A practical solution for the development of real-world multi-robot applications is presented. It consists of a robot middleware (Player) and a multi-agent development environment (JADE). Such components provide off-the-shelf tools which allow a straightforward implementation of indoor localization and navigation tasks for a team of mobile robots. Such integration combines proven mobile robot algorithms with a distributed infrastructure, and extends the capabilities from a robot alone to a whole team of robots, thus allowing the development of cooperative applications. As a proof of concept, an auction-like goal assignment task is presented: the robot team is given a goal, and each robot proposes an estimated cost for achieving it, then the best proposal is selected. Most of the control flow is automated by the JADE standard interaction protocols. Experimental evaluation demonstrates the advantages of combining both frameworks, for a practical yet sound development of multi-robot applications.