Human Robot Interaction in Multi-Agent Systems

Abstract

The oil and gas industry experience an increased dependency on IT and particular soft- ware based capabilities to achieve its business objectives. Core business processes such as exploration, well construction, production optimization and operations are all fueled by software and information technology. In coming years we will see that software will ll more and more advanced features, including central control functions in autonomous and collaborative robots and it is believed that agent technology may be of use in this scenario. The practical bene t from goal oriented systems is a simpli cation of the human-machine interface. A goal oriented system is able to communicate and react to events in its environment in context of their goals. This is the primary driver for autonomous systems: Simplifying and securing operation of machines in an unstructured / highly dynamic environment. Human Robot Interaction (HRI) is an important area in development of autonomous robot systems where an operator is present. The design and solution for the HRI will be crucial to the systems performance and robustness. An operator can be relieved of stress as well as have his focus directed to important and critical information at any given time. In this thesis I will look at how intelligent agents can be used to implement a system for controlling autonomous robots and how this can provide a good solution for HRI challenges. To achieve this a multi-agent solution controlling Lego Mindstorms robots has been developed in cooperation with Eirik Nordb . The solution is based on three Lego robots operating on a line-based grid. One robot is set to explore the grid, nding objects, and sharing this information (beliefs) with a second robot which is responsible for collecting and delivering these objects to a robot in charge of sorting them according to color. This solution enables investigation of several challenges in relation to intelligent software agents combined with autonomous robot/machine systems, such as human robot interaction and inter-agent communica- tion/coordination. The agent system is developed using the Prometheus methodology for the design and the JACK Intelligent Agents framework for the implementation. Regular Java is used combined with the LeJos - Java For Mindstorms framework to implement the robot side of the system.