Implementing ALLIANCE in networked robots using mobile agents

Abstract Mobile Agents (MA's) combine the functionality found in all other distributed computing paradigms in a unified environment and provide a natural design philosophy for distributed computing systems such as multiple robot architectures. MA's offer a wide range of positive functional characteristics. In this paper we present two examples to show how such characteristics can be used to extend the adaptability and fault tolerance of a multiple robot architecture. We do this through a mobile agent implementation of the ALLIANCE architecture in multiple networked robots.