A FIPA-Based Communication Infrastructure for a Reconfigurable Multi-robot System

This paper presents a high-level communication infrastructure to deal with dynamically changing reconfigurable multi-robot systems. The infrastructure builds upon official standards of the Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents (FIPA). FIPA standards have been successfully applied in a variety of multi-agent frameworks, but they have found little application in the domain of robotics. This paper introduces an implementation that can complement existing robotic communication frameworks and allows the robotics community to take better advantage of multi-agent research efforts. We present the essential components of the infrastructure and show its interoperability using the widely known multi-agent framework JADE.