Cooperative Material Handling by Human and Robotic Agents: Task Description and Experiments

In this paper we present the experimental results of a collaborative eeort to design and implement a system for cooperative material handling by a small team of human and robotic agents in an unstructured indoor environment. More details about the system and its design are reported in 1]. Our research stresses both paradigms and testbed experimentation. Theory issues include the requisite coordination principles and techniques fundamental to the basic functioning of such a cooperative multi-agent system. We have constructed a testbed facility for experimenting with distributed multi-agent architectures. The required modular components of this testbed are currently operational and have been tested individually. Our current research focuses on the integration of agents in a scenario for cooperative material handling.

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