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Mobile-R

The Mobile-R System

Mobile-R is a mobile agent-based robot control and deployment platform for mission-based virtual and physical networked multi-robot systems. Mobile-R is highly extensible and reconfigurable and follows the multi-agent standards of the Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents (FIPA). It allows for the implementation of architectures popularly used in the different multi-robot paradigms. Mobile-R is based on widely accepted standards for multi-agent interaction allowing for interoperability with other multi-agent system Using mobile agents provides innate fault-tolerance by using the mobile agents' ability to migrate to different hosts. Mobile-R contains all of the salient features of an ideal robot middleware. The system is based on the standard C/C++ programming language and provides a simple interface for extending functionality to reduce the computational and programing efforts and it is easy to use. Since Mobile-R is based on C/C++, the system can easily be extended and existing C/C++ based software can quickly be integrated into the system. Mobile agents provide a mechanism for rapid reprogrammability of a system and migration capability between virtual robots in a simulated environment and and real-world physical systems.

Mobile-R utilizes Mobile-C as it mobile agent system. Mobile-C is an IEEE FIPA standard compliant mobile agent system that was initially implemented as a standalone application with the primary intention of fitting into applications with networked mechatronic and embedded systems involving low-level hardware. In order to provide distributed applications with significant code mobility, a Mobile-C library was developed that allows Mobile-C to be embedded into applications to support C/C++ mobile agents. The Mobile-C library is an implementation of the IEEE FIPA compliant mobile agent system using Ch, an embeddable C/C++ interpreter, as its agent execution engine. Mobile-C agents are structured as C/C++ code wrapped in XML for ease in portability and flexibility.

Sample Applications:

Planetary Reconnaissance

Perimeter patrolling