Reactive visual control of multiple non-holonomic robotic agents

We have developed a multiagent robotic system including perception, cognition, and action components to function in a dynamic environment. The system involves the integration and coordination of a variety of diverse functional modules. At the sensing level, our complete multiagent robotic system incorporates detection and recognition algorithms to handle the motion of multiple mobile robots in a noisy environment. At the strategic and decision-making level, deliberative and reactive components take in the processed sensory inputs and select the appropriate actions to reach objectives under the dynamic and changing environmental conditions. At the actuator level, physical robotic effecters execute the motion commands generated by the cognition level. In this paper, we focus on presenting our approach for reactive visual control of multiple mobile robots. We present a tracking and prediction algorithm which handles visually homogeneous agents. We describe our nonholonomic control for single robot navigation, and show how it applies to dynamic path generation to avoid multiple moving obstacles. We illustrate our algorithms with examples from our real implementation. Using the approaches introduced, our robotic team won the RoboCup-97 small-size robot competition at IJCAI-97 in Nagoya, Japan.