Multi-agent systems: A survey from the robot-soccer perspective

One of the most challenging goals in artificial intelligence (AI) is the development of artificial intelligent autonomous agents with human-level performance. The past few years has witnessed a tremendous interest in research and discussions on intelligent agents. With the ever increasing number of robots in an industrial environment, scientists and technologists are often faced with issues on cooperation and coordination among different robots and their self governance in a common work-space. This has led to developments in multi-robot cooperative autonomous systems. With an aim to study issues such as group architecture, resource conflict, origin of cooperation, learning and geometric problems, groups of robots are constructed. The proponents of multi-robot autonomous systems needed a model to validate the theories being proposed and to test their efficacy and efficiency. It is no surprise that they started focussing on robot soccer. Robot soccer makes heavy demands in all the key areas of robot technology, mechanics, sensors and intelligence. It does so in a competitive setting that people around the world can understand and enjoy. This paper gives a survey, though not exhaustive, on the present scenario of multi-agent systems and cooperative robotics. The robot-soccer system is discussed as a test benchmark for multi-robot systems.