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Cooperating Cleaning Robots

  • Conference paper
Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems 5

Abstract

If multiple robots are used to cooperatively clean a large room, e.g. an airport, a variety of problems have to be solved. The area which has to be cleaned must be partitioned among the robots, each robot must completely cover the area it is responsible for and collisions among the robots must be avoided.

In this paper we describe the problems in detail and provide some solutions. The methods described in the paper work completely decentralized. They do not require a centralized component or global synchronization. There is also no need for a global communication network. We demonstrate that it is sufficient for the robots to communicate in a local neighborhood.

We also introduce an agent based control architecture for mobile robots. The architecture allows us to integrate the solutions to all the problems into one system. The basic idea is that each robot is controlled by a set of agents. The agents can cooperate with each other or with agents of other robots.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Corporate Technology, Information & Communications, Siemens AG, 81730, Munich, Germany

    Markus Jäger

Authors
  1. Markus Jäger
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Advanced Engineering Center, RIKEN (The Institute of Physical and Chemical Research), 2-1 Hirosawa, 351-0198, Wako-shi, Saitama, Japan

    Hajime Asama (Head of Instrumentation Project Promotion Division) (Head of Instrumentation Project Promotion Division)

  2. Department of Precision Machinery Engineering, The Unviersity of Tokyo, 7-3-1 Hongo, 113-8656, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo, Japan

    Tamio Arai (Professor) (Professor)

  3. Department of Micro System Engineering, Nagoya University, 464-8603, Furo-cho, Chikusa-ku, Nagoya, Japan

    Toshio Fukuda (Professor) (Professor)

  4. Department of Intelligent Systems Graduate School of Information and Electrical Engineering, Kyushu University, 6-10-1 Hakozaki, 812-8581, Higaschi-ku, Fukuoka, Japan

    Tsutomu Hasegawa (Professor) (Professor)

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© 2002 Springer-Verlag Tokyo

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Cite this paper

Jäger, M. (2002). Cooperating Cleaning Robots. In: Asama, H., Arai, T., Fukuda, T., Hasegawa, T. (eds) Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems 5. Springer, Tokyo. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-4-431-65941-9_24

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-4-431-65941-9_24

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Tokyo

  • Print ISBN: 978-4-431-65943-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-4-431-65941-9

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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