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Social-Aware Coordination of Multi-robot Systems Based on Institutions

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Human Behavior Understanding in Networked Sensing

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Abstract

Institutional robotics (IR) is an approach to the coordination of multi-robot systems that draws inspiration from social sciences, namely from institutional economics. Using the concept of institution, it aims to provide a comprehensive strategy for specifying social interactions (e.g., norms, roles, hierarchies) among robots. In previous work, we have introduced a control methodology for multi-robot systems that takes into account institutions in order to create an Institutional Agent Controller (IAC) that captures such social interactions. In this chapter, the IAC design methodology is validated in a case study concerned with a swarm of 40 real, resource-constrained robots which has to maintain wireless connectivity. We then investigate a second case study dealing with more complex social interactions, showing that institutional roles can effectively help a multi-robot system to coordinate and improve performance in a given task of social nature. Given the fact that institutions are one of the tools in use within human societies to shape social interactions, our intuition is that IR can also facilitate coordination with humans in scenarios involving many-to-many human–robot interactions. We discuss how the IR concepts and the IAC design methodology can be implemented in real-world scenarios where multiple robots must interact with multiple humans in a socially aware manner.

This work was partially supported by Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) through grants SFRH/BD/33671/2009 (first author, as part of the Joint Doctoral Program IST-EPFL) and SFRH/BPD/35862/2007 (second author), as well as by FCT ISR/IST Pluriannual funding through the PIDDAC program funds, and by EU under FP7/2007-2013—Challenge 2—Cognitive Systems, Interaction, Robotics—grant agreement 601033—MOnarCH.

 \(\copyright \) 2013 IEEE. Reprinted, with permission, from Pereira et al., An Experimental Study in Wireless Connectivity Maintenance Using up to 40 Robots Coordinated by an Institutional Robotics Approach., Proceedings of the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 5073–5079, 2013.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    MOnarCH—Multi-Robot Cognitive Systems Operating in Hospitals, FP7-ICT European project. More info at http://monarch-fp7.eu/.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Distributed Intelligent Systems and Algorithms Laboratory—EPFL, EPFL ENAC IIE DISAL, Station 2, 1015, Lausanne, Switzerland

    José N. Pereira & Alcherio Martinoli

  2. Institute for Systems and Robotics—Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa, Av. Rovisco Pais 1, 1049, Lisboa, Portugal

    Porfírio Silva & Pedro U. Lima

Authors
  1. José N. Pereira
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  2. Porfírio Silva
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  3. Pedro U. Lima
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  4. Alcherio Martinoli
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Correspondence to José N. Pereira .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. National Research Council, Lecce, Lecce, Italy

    Paolo Spagnolo

  2. National Research Council, Lecce, Lecce, Italy

    Pier Luigi Mazzeo

  3. National Research Council, Lecce, Lecce, Italy

    Cosimo Distante

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Pereira, J.N., Silva, P., Lima, P.U., Martinoli, A. (2014). Social-Aware Coordination of Multi-robot Systems Based on Institutions. In: Spagnolo, P., Mazzeo, P., Distante, C. (eds) Human Behavior Understanding in Networked Sensing. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10807-0_19

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10807-0_19

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-10807-0

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