Open Collections

A constraint-based approach to real-time cooperative multiagent systems: a soccer-playing robot team

University of British Columbia

It is not an easy task for a team of multiple fast-moving robots to cooperate with each other and try to beat another team in a dynamic, real-time environment. In order for a robot team to successfully play a soccer game, various technologies have to be incorporated including: robotic architectures, multi-agent collaboration and real-time reasoning. A robot is an integrated system, with a controller embedded in its plant. A robotic system is the coupling of a robot to its environment. Robotic systems are, in general, hybrid dynamic systems, consisting of continuous, discrete and event-driven components. Constraint Nets (CN) provide a semantic model for modeling hybrid dynamic systems. Controllers can be embedded constraint solvers that solve constraints in real-time. The controller for the robot soccer team player, UBC Dynamo98, has been modeled in Constraint Nets and implemented in Java. The various multi-agent collaborations have been treated as a part of the set of constraints which the controller solves in real-time. A coach program using an evolutionary algorithm has also been designed and implemented to adjust the weights of the constraints and other parameters in the controller. The results of the soccer tournament suggest that the formal Constraint Net approach is a practical tool for designing and implementing controllers for robots in multi-agent real-time environments. They also demonstrate the effectiveness of applying the evolutionary algorithm to the CN modeled controllers.

Thesis/Dissertation

application/pdf

2009-05-28

For non-commercial purposes only, such as research, private study and education. Additional conditions apply, see Terms of Use https://open.library.ubc.ca/terms_of_use.

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/8385

Computer Science

University of British Columbia

UBCV

DSpace