Human Heuristics for a Team of Mobile Robots

Abstract

This paper is at the crossroad of cognitive psychology and AI robotics. It reports a cross-disciplinary project concerned about implementing human heuristics within autonomous mobile robots. In the following, we address the problem of relying on human-based heuristics to endow a group of mobile robots with the ability to solve problems such as target finding in a labyrinth. Such heuristics may provide an efficient way to explore the environment and to decompose a complex problem into subtasks for which specific heuristics are efficient. We first present a set of experiments conducted with group of humans looking for a target with limited sensing capabilities solving. Then we describe the heuristics extracted from the observation and analysis of their behavior. Finally we implemented these heuristics within khepera-like autonomous mobile robots facing the same tasks. We show that the control architecture can be experimentally validated to some extent thanks to this approach.