A Cooperative Communications Platform for Safety Critical Robotics: An Experimental Evaluation

As the number of handicapped people increases worldwide, Intelligent Wheelchairs (IW) are becoming the solution to enable a higher degree of independence for wheelchair users. In addition, IW Projects relevance is increasing, mainly in the fields of robotics and safety-related systems due to their inherent and still unresolved problems related with environment uncertainty, safe communications and collaboration methodologies. This paper describes the development of new communication system, based on multi-agent systems (MAS) and motivated by Intelligent Wheelchair systems. It uses a message-oriented paradigm as a mean for fault-tolerant communications in open transmission systems as well as a facilitator for entity collaboration. It provides an overview of the related work in the area, the background and the main constraints to system development, contextualized an IW development project. The results achieved enable us to conclude on the effectiveness and adequacy of the proposed communication model to the field of mobile robots, as well as to conclude that it may outperform JADE in several test scenarios.