Intelligent data carrier system for cooperative behaviors emerged among collective robots

This paper introduces a system, including a new device named "intelligent data carrier" (IDC), for emergent cooperative behaviors in a collective robot system. The IDC is an immobile but portable device (data carrier) for information storage and management, and is developed to make the multi-robot system more flexible and robust against complex environmental conditions by reducing the amount of global communication for mutual exchange of information which is useful locally in a limited area. A robot can place an IDC unit at an arbitrary location in its working environment and write locally useful knowledge into the unit. Other robots can, for example, share the knowledge which should indicate the existence of specific instruments, objects or environmental topographies, e.g., dead ends, drop-offs, steps, etc., by reading from the placed IDC units. In this paper, some application examples are introduced to show that the IDCs can be effectively used in the tasks appearing in the practical missions of collective robot systems.