Knowledge acquisition and sharing among autonomous robots by intelligent data carriers

We propose a cooperative autonomous robotic system that enables autonomous knowledge acquisition and sharing for the effective execution of tasks. We established a device to store knowledge on a work area as well as an algorithm to acquire and share knowledge. We have developed new hardware of the device referred to as an 'intelligent data carrier (IDC)'. The IDC is an immobile but portable device for knowledge storage and management. The IDC realizes local communication by radio waves. We propose an algorithm to improve the efficiency of iterative transportation tasks performed by autonomous mobile robots. An autonomous mobile robot gives the name of its most recently visited destination to an IDC, which is located on a junction in a work area. An IDC summarizes the knowledge collected from robots and reports a direction that it determines as the optimum route for a robot to take. By the proposed algorithm and system, mobile robots construct a knowledge base for navigation and improve the efficiency of a task automatically without generating any global map. We verified the effect of the proposed algorithm by performing simulations and experiments.