Development of Agent System for Multi-robot Search

In this paper, we propose an agent system that controls multiple mobile robots. We describe the agent system as well as an example multi-robot system as an application of this agent system. The aim of the multi-robot system is providing efficient searches for a given target. Therefore, it is necessary to mutually communicate and cooperate among robots. Taking account of the delay of communication, cost, fault tolerance, and robustness, we have chosen mobile agent system for the information transmission method. We have also chosen ad-hoc method for the communication mode, where each robot communicates directly without going through the Internet. Even though agent systems are often implemented using Java language or Python language, we have chosen C++ language for developing our agent system with the hope for gaining performance efficiency. We have modularized each function and it does not depend on other modules. We have shown the feasibility of our multi-agent system by applying the system to a multi-robot system that implement particle swarm optimization.