Cooperative multirobot systems have become an
active research area in the recent years. These research activities
are looking for having a multiple robots involved in one system
and cooperating in order to achieve the desired task(s). By this
cooperation, some goals that were impossible for a single robot
to achieve will become feasible and attainable. Also, it will
help in increasing the overall system's reliability. Effective
and robust cooperation among the robots can also synergistically
improve the performance of the system and can endow it with higher-level
faculties, such as distributed search, dynamic task allocation,
communication relaying, cooperative target detection and tracking
and shared situation awareness. To achieve this effective cooperation,
the robots must have know-how capability for solving simple
problems in an autonomous way and a know-how-to-cooperate
by which agents can share common interests and interact with each
other to solve complex problems cooperatively.
This seminar provides well-grounded and informative answers to
questions like what is meant by cooperation, why cooperation is
important, why it is difficult to achieve robust and effective
cooperation in multirobot systems and how to achieve cooperative
behaviors in these systems. The seminar will start by introducing
multirobot systems highlighting their applications, benchmark
problems, organizational paradigms and challenging aspects. The
concepts of cooperation will be explained starting by highlighting
the cooperative behaviors between living things in order to understand
and learn how to imitate these behaviors in artificial systems.
Lessons learned from study of cooperative behaviors of living
things can be helpful to understand many aspects of cooperation
such as the highly centralized control, the hierarchical control,
the decentralized nature of the coordination between the living
entities, their self-organization and the collective intelligence
behaviors, which help these entities in achieving their task successfully.
The concepts of agent as a cooperative entity will be discussed
highlighting the key features of cooperative agents and cooperation
in multiagent systems.
The seminar also provides a comprehensive study of different concepts
related to cooperation from socio-cognitive perspectives such
as social interactions, reciprocal cooperation, individualism
and collectivism and personal orientation. Understanding these
concepts has been source of inspiration of many theories of cooperation
between artificial agents. Different theories of cooperation reported
in the philosophical and scientific literature will be summarized.
The seminar will discuss different models of cooperation that
have been proposed based on these theories. Modeling and simulation
tools for cooperative systems will be surveyed.
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16374-Cooperative Multirobot Systems Course Objectives:
Course Outline:
Course Instructor: Dr. Alaa Khamis Email: a[dot]khamis[at]pami[dot]uwaterloo[dot]ca Office: TBD Office hours: TBD Textbooks: |