Reactive Cooperation of AIBO Robots
(Master Thesis presentation)

Iņaki Navarro Oiza

AI Seminar, Friday 8th October 2004



The aim of the project was to study how cooperation of AIBO robots
could be achieved. In order to do that a specific problem in which two
robots have to pass the ball between them was defined. To cooperate
the robots must be able to communicate. Therefore a communication
module was developed. In order to design the solution an analysis of
the existing framework used by Team Chaos in RoboCup was done. It was
found that self-localization facility was not functioning. This made
it impossible to build maps of the environment and design a
deliberative solution of the problem. That was the reason why a
reactive approach was taken. While performing the passes each of the
robots has a specific role: receiver or kicker. This role is decided
among other things taking into account the information received from
the other dog. Several experiments were undertaken investigating the
type and amount of shared information. These experiments were
implemented and their results compared. The results have confirmed the
expectations, showing that the robots may cooperate with reasonable
accuracy given the circumstances.