Human-robot interface architecture for distributed environments

In order to support the cooperative work of human, the research of computer-supported cooperative work has been evolved, and many groupware have also been developed. In the cooperative work of human, the task may involve in the transportation of physical entities that conventional groupware can not handle. The authors propose an interface architecture for the transportation of physical entities in distributed environments by utilizing mobile robots. In this paper, they propose a multi-agent model that can represent human-robot interaction in distributed environments by extending the multi-agent model of the groupware toolkit Michele developed by the authors. The interface system based on the extended multi-agent model has been implemented by utilizing the autonomous mobile robot Einstein developed in the laboratory. The multi-agent model, the agent description language, implementation issues and applications for office automation are described