Cooperatively searching objects based on mobile agents

This paper presents a framework for controlling multiple robots connected by communication networks. Instead of making multiple robots pursue several tasks simultaneously, the framework makes mobile software agents migrate from one robot to another to perform the tasks. Since mobile software agents can migrate to arbitrary robots by wireless communication networks, they can find the most suitably equipped and/or the most suitably located robots to perform their task. In this paper, we propose a multiple robot control approach based on mobile agents for searching targets as one of the effective examples. Though it is a simple task, it can be extended to any other more practial examples, or be used as an element of a real application because of its simplicity. We have conducted two kinds of experiments in order to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. One is an actual system with three real robots, and the other is a simulation system with a larger number of robots. The results of these experiments show that our approach achieves reducing the total time cost consumed by all robots while suppressing the energy consumption.