A Framework for Cognitive Agents

We designed a family of completely autonomous mobile robots with local intelligence. Each robot has a number of on-board sensors, including vision, and does not rely on global positioning systems The on-board embedded controller is sufficient to analyze several low-resolution color images per second. This enables our robots to perform several complex tasks such as navigation, map generation, or providing intelligent group behavior. Not being limited to playing the game of soccer and being completely autonomous, we are also looking at a number of other interesting scenarios. The robots can communicate with each other, e.g. for exchanging positions, information about objects or just the local states they are currently in (e.g. sharing their current objectives with other robots in the group). We are particularly interested in the differences between a behavior-based approach versus a traditional control algorithm at this still very low level of action.