INTEGRATING SKILLS INTO MULTIAGENT SYSTEMS

Currently, an important topic of robotic research is the design and de velopment of multi-agent robot systems (MASs). In these a number of au tonomous robots cooperate and coordinate themselves in order to pursue given goals. The agents of an MAS not only have to work autonomously or in cooperation with other agents, but in dynamic, relatively unstru ctured environments. Therefore, the agents require agent-specific but flexible skills to cope with their tasks and the environment's variabi lity. On the other hand, the actions to be performed by agents in an M AS have to meet certain requirements imposed by the MAS's structure. T he representation of actions has to support planning, inter-agent comm unication, task negotiation etc. In this paper, we describe a method o f combining the agent-specific nature of skills with the requirements for a general action knowledge representation inherent to MASs, by pre senting elementary operations (EOs) that provide an appropriate interf ace. (C) 1998 Chapman & Hall.