Many Robots Make Short Work: Report of the SRI International Mobile Robot Team

Abstract

Indoor mobile robots are becoming reliable enough in navigation tasks to consider working with teams of robots. Using SRI International's open-agent architecture (OAA) and SAPHIRA robot-control system, we configured three physical robots and a set of software agents on the internet to plan and act in coordination. Users communicate with the robots using a variety of multimodal input: pen, voice, and keyboard. The robust capabilities of the OAA and SAPHIRA enabled us to design and implement a winning team in the six weeks before the Fifth Annual AAAI Mobile Robot Competition and Exhibition.