This paper describes a method for localizing the members of a mobile robot team using only the robots themselves as landmarks. That is, we describe a method whereby each robot can determine the relative range, bearing, and orientation of every other robot in the team, without the use of GPS, external landmarks, or instrumentation of the environment. We assume that robots are equipped with propr...

Product development processes increasingly happen in cooperations, where cooperation partners are dislocated in time and space. This leads to the fact that teamworkers have to be more and more mobile and brings us to the presumption that the support of spontaneous information exchange and mobile ad hoc interaction among team members will gain in importance. Some of the questions that have to be...

Research, into Web-based teamwork support has assumed that the network connection exists permanently, i.e. online. However, there is a n increasing demand that teamwork environments should also support the offline mobile scenario that as so far not well addressed. This paper describes the radical requirements, novel mechanisms and innovative prototype for team members to work in an o p i n e mo...

This research addresses the problem of achieving fault tolerant cooperation within smallto medium-sized teams of heterogeneous mobile robots. We describe a novel behavior-based, fully distributed architecture, called ALLIANCE, that utilizes adaptive action selection to achieve fault tolerant cooperative control. The robots in this architecture possess a variety of high-level functions that they...

ALLIANCE is a software architecture that facilitates the fault tolerant cooperative control of teams of het erogeneous mobile robots performing missions composed of loosely coupled subtasks that may have ordering dependencies ALLIANCE allows teams of robots each of which possesses a variety of high level functions that it can perform during a mission to individually select appropriate actions t...

We present a constrained optimization method for multi-robot formation control in dynamic environments, where the robots adjust the parameters of the formation, such as size and three-dimensional orientation, to avoid collisions with static and moving obstacles, and to make progress towards their goal. We describe two variants of the algorithm, one for local motion planning and one for global p...

A Mobile Collaborative System (MCOS) enable the cooperation of the members of a team to achieve a common goal by using a combination of mobile and fixed technologies. MCOS can be enhanced if the context of the group of users is considered in the execution of activities. This paper proposes a novel model for Context-Aware Mobile COllaborative Systems (CAMCOS) and a functional architecture based ...

This work presents a tool that provides an easy and intuitive remote interaction with a team of mobile robots through Internet. It has been designed with the aim that students of Robotics carry out training with mobile robots from their own home, independently of the operative system they use and with a minimum installation in their computer. This tool facilitates the understanding of several a...

In this paper, we investigate the design, analysis and implementation of a flexible, scalable system of multiple mobile robots, that are individually autonomous and can team up to cooperatively transport large objects and to perform tasks that simply cannot be performed by a single mobile platform. Such frameworks for remotely controlled or remotely supervised cooperation of multiple autonomous...