On Traffic Laws for Mobile Robots (Extended Abstract)

Publisher Summary This chapter describes traffic laws for mobile robots. It discusses a theory of social laws in a computational environment, laws which guarantee successful coexistence of multiple programs and programmers in a shared environment. The chapter illustrates the issues that come up when designing a society by discussing the domain of mobile robots. Although still relatively simple, state-of-the-art mobile robots are able to perform several sorts of tasks. However, when one considers gathering several robots in a shared environment, a host of new problems arises. The activities of the robots might interfere with one another, and robots may require the assistance of other robots to carry out their task. To deal with phenomena, there are two extreme answers, one is to assume a single designer, whose job it is to program all the robots. An alternative extreme answer is to admit that agents will be programmed individually in an unconstrained fashion, and to equip the agents with the means for handling these interactions during execution.