ALLIANCE - AN ARCHITECTURE FOR FAULT-TOLERANT MULTIROBOT COOPERATION

ALLIANCE is a software architecture that facilitates the fault toleran t cooperative control of teams of heterogeneous mobile robots performi ng missions composed of loosely coupled subtasks that may have orderin g dependencies, ALLIANCE allows teams of robots, each of which possess es a variety of high-level functions that it can perform during a miss ion, to individually select appropriate actions throughout the mission based on the requirements of the mission, the activities of other rob ots, the current environmental conditions, and the robot's own interna l states, ALLIANCE is a fully distributed, behavior-based architecture that incorporates the use of mathematically-modeled motivations (such as impatience and acquiescence) within each robot to achieve adaptive action selection, Since cooperative robotic teams usually work in dyn amic and unpredictable environments, this software architecture allows the robot team members to respond robustly, reliably, flexibly, and c oherently to unexpected environmental changes and modifications in the robot team that may occur due to mechanical failure, the learning of new skills, or the addition or removal of robots from the team by huma n intervention. The feasibility of this architecture is demonstrated i n an implementation on a team of mobile robots performing a laboratory version of hazardous waste cleanup.