Session:

Standard Components and Activities in the Engineering of Intelligent Systems
Monday March 01, 2004, 12.10 – 12.30

Session Chair:

Tatjana Welzer

Paper Title:

Higher-Order Mobile Agents for Controlling Intelligent Robots

Author(s):

Y. Kambayashi, Nippon Institute of Technology, Japan
M. Takimoto, Tokyo University of Science, Japan

Abstract:

This paper presents a framework for controlling intelligent robots. This framework provides novel methods to control coordinated systems using higher-order mobile agents. Higher-order mobile agents are hierarchically structured agents that can contain other mobile agents. By using higher-order mobile agents, intelligent robots in action can acquire new functionalities dynamically as well as exchange their roles with other colleague robots. The higher-order property of the mobile agents enables them to be organized hierarchically and dynamically. Each mobile agent can be a container of other mobile agents and can migrate to other agents. Therefore the robots controlled by the mobile agents can acquire new functions by migration of other agents. The extended agent behaves as a single agent so that it can migrate to another agent with the containing agents. In addition to the advantages described above, higher-order mobile agents require minimum communication. They only need connection being established when they perform migration. This is useful for controlling robots working in a remote site.