Physical robot Agents: Coordinated Intelligent and Rational Agents for Collaborative robots

This paper reports on ongoing research to design coordination and cooperation ubiquitous to the control and tasking of multiple heterogeneous physical robot agents (PRAs) using a real-time agent architecture. The primary objective of the work presented here is to develop a real-time agent architecture and a distributed architectural framework that enables multiple PRAs to coordinate time-constrained high-level tasks in a collaborative manner. At the abstract level, we identify two layers, cognitive and action, based on the type of the PRA's responsibilities. At the cognitive layer we propose an extended version of the coordinated, intelligent rational agent (CIR-agent) model for complex real-time systems. The architecture facilitates integration between the cognitive layer and the action layer through the controller and functional modules. Our architecture also recognizes the coexistence of agent-oriented frameworks, such as JADE, and non-agent frameworks, like CORBA, to accommodate the cognitive and the action layers respectively.