Modeling and control of autonomous soccer robots using high-level Petri nets

Coordination of multiple autonomous robots is a typical research problem in Multi-agent systems. The distributed agent models that represent the supervisory controllers of autonomous soccer robots are capable of communication, interaction and collaboration. By introducing the multi-agent based control architecture, the soccer robots perform seamless team cooperation to achieve the desired mission during competition. Due to the multi-soccer robot system is a discrete event dynamic system with concurrent and asynchronous characteristics, the distributed agent-oriented Petri net (DAOPN) is selected in this paper to model and control the behaviors of the multi-soccer robot systems. The agent models proposed in this work consist of the coordination model and the skill oriented robot behavior models. Especially, the agent based communication places enable the distributed agent models to be communicated directly. In this manner, the DAOPN based agent models can act as the robot controllers and coordinator to perform run-time controls of the soccer robot team. Therefore, the proposed approach not only resolves problems of the multi-robot coordination, but also provides a feasible way to overcome the complicated mathematical functions or rule bases. Finally, this system is tested using four soccer robots, and the results verify the proposed DAOPN based controller.