Distributed architecture for effective multirobot cooperation in team competitions

The research of multiagent systems has been widely studied for many years, however, the topic of multirobot team competitions has not been extensively investigated. In this paper, we propose a fully distributed, behavior-based software architecture termed Emerge, which facilitates flexible and reliable coordination on a team of robots performing tasks that may be subverted by another team of robots. Emerge enables the robots to achieve flexible action selections through the use of four mathematically-modeled motivations (practicability, feasibility, tendency and execution priority). With the aid of these motivations, the human knowledge, which usually involves a number of fuzzy concepts, may be conveniently merged to the robot team by following a clear and logical design procedure. The feasibility of this architecture has been demonstrated through an example on a team of robots performing a simulated 3-on-3 robot soccer game.