Development of unmanned ground vehicle for multi agent systems

An engineering approach to designing an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) operating in multi agent systems is presented in the paper. The objective of multi agent systems is to surveil allocated regions for environmental monitoring, e.g. forest fire. The UGV is designed to work as a single agent to gather environmental information for surveillance. In this research, a Hardware-In-the-Loop Simulation (HILS) technique is used to save development cost and human effort. That is, one of the UGVs is developed in reality and the others are generated virtually for HILS. Furthermore, a detailed account for the development of a multi agent system including hardware layouts, software architecture, and communication among a distributed system is presented. Finally the feasibility of this platform is validated experimentally via HILS.