A Multi-Agent Architecture for Swarm Robotics Systems

Swarm robotics is an emerging approach to coordinate a large number of robots. These robots, which are usually simple and low-cost, may perform a wide variety of missions, serving either civilian or military applications. Since autonomy, modularity, collaboration and interactivity are characteristics of swarm robotics systems, the multi-agent paradigm became a natural choice to address their issues. Because of its inherent complexity and reuse possibilities, there are many advantages in using system-of-systems architectures for designing swarm robotics systems. This paper targets two main contributions: to improve the understanding of the fundamental requirements of swarm robotics systems and to propose a multi-agent architecture to assist the development of systems that perform both command and control and simulation of heterogeneous robots that interacts with each other and with humans in order to accomplish several types of missions.