Behavioural Realism of Modelling Multi-Agent Communication Protocols in Virtual Environment

This paper presents an advanced implementation of a virtual environment to develop and test communication protocols for multi-agent systems. This because virtual environments provide 3d simulation tools that allow for more realistic simulations. Embedding human capability into the control system software, the work considers the application of a multiple robots communication system. Current implementations of full-scale virtual environments to evaluate robotic applications is used for the purpose of simulating and testing the hardware whilst producing single-robot applications. The work presented in this paper exemplifies the use of full-scale virtual environments to test the communication between multiple robots. This implementation of virtual environments is shown to be efficient as it allows uses to: a) greater understand the robots' behaviours under different communication rules, b) easier compare different communication techniques, centralised/decentralised and hybrid communications. Employing the virtual environment as a testing tool increases the efficiency of the evaluation process. The visual assessment outputs using a semi-immersive full-scale environment also has been advantageous in directing numerical analysis.