Supporting the participation of autonomous mobile robots as players in multimedia performances

Progress in robotics has led to the development of commercial robots, especially entertainment ones, which aspire to become a part of our everyday lives. However, the integration of these devices in significant art and entertainment applications, such as multimedia performances, is especially hard because of the lack of appropriate development environments. The paper seeks to address this problem by describing CHOROS, a Java-based environment that allows authoring and control of multimedia performances involving autonomous mobile robots. Authoring is accomplished through an interface that possesses augmented reality features. A behavior-based controller is responsible for controlling the behavior of the robots during the performance.