Cooperative control of mobile robots for target search

Multi-agent teams have the potential to accomplish some goals more efficiently than single agent systems. The success of the team depends critically on the ability of the agents to coordinate their operations. For this reason, the presence of a robust and reliable control architecture and a cooperation framework is as important as the design of individual agents. In this paper, we present a hierarchical control architecture that provides a methodology to control individual robots and to coordinate the operations of multiple robots. Furthermore, we introduce a multi-robot wireless test bed constructed based on this framework. The effectiveness of the frame-work is demonstrated by considering an optimal search problem. It is observed that the proposed architecture provides a useful framework to design cooperative control strategies.