A Distributed Multiagent Architecture

A distributed architecture based on the usage of intelligent user interfaces and multiagent systems to facilitate cooperative Internet-based remote interaction with a multirobot system is presented in this book. The proposed system relies on the agent paradigm for dealing with the complexity of cooperative remote interaction systems with multirobots, while taking advantage of intelligent user interfaces for obtaining high degree of naturalness during the interaction sessions. This generic architecture, featuring multimodality and adaptivity, supports an unlimited number of robots, an unlimited number of behaviors, and offers different operation modes making it a suitable platform for mobile multirobot remote applications. A concern is made around the user-centered experience, in order to provide the user with seamless interaction despite the scalability. Two different application scenarios based on this architecture are implemented and demonstrated to verify the architecture’s efficacy. At the time of writing, this work presents the first attempt of using Adobe Flash as an implementation tool for generating a real-time Internet-based multirobot interface.