Experiments in realising cooperation between autonomous mobile robots

This paper describes experiments in cooperation using autonomous mobile robots to perform a cleaning task. The robots have heterogeneous capabilities and the task is designed so that cooperation is required. Each experiment increases the sophistication of the cooperation scheme to assess the effect on task performance. The experiments range from using emergent cooperation with no communication to explicit cooperation and communication. We also propose an action selection mechanism that can also be used for distributed planning of joint actions inspired by the way primates co-construct joint plans.