The design competition proposed for RTSS 2008 develops around a
simulated multi-robot rescue mission. Each team is composed by five
mobile autonomous agents that need to find a specific spot in a maze
(target) and join there. This challenge falls in the foraging class,
one of the canonical testbeds for cooperative robotics, and raises
challenges in real-time control for adequate navigation, real-time ad-
hoc communication within the team, topology management to keep
connectivity, and others that have been addressed by the real-time
systems community at large, in the recent years.
Each participating team is composed by 5 independent, but desirably
cooperating, robotic agents. The robots can communicate with each other using an
emulated ad-hoc wireless communication protocol with realistic
parameters:
limited bandwidth, limited range and a random non-zero latency and error
probability.
Beyond the communication capabilities, each robot has its own set of
sensors (obstacle, GPS, compass, beacon, collision, hear and ground) and
actuators (motors, communication and leds)
The robotic team forms a distributed system.
The major competition
challenge is thus to develop efficient cooperation strategies capable of
minimizing the time required to find the target area and bring all the
robots there, considering constrained communication resources and
sensors.
Related competitions:
CiberMouse@RTSS2007
CiberMouse@RTSS2006
Ciber-Rato @ Universidade
de Aveiro
All participants in CiberMouse@RTSS2008 will need
to register as "Workshop participant". Please, visit
RTSS 2008 website.
Similarly to last year, teams will be asked to provide a short paper
(up to 4 pages with IEEE conference format). These papers will be
distributed among all participants at the event.
Submission of team papers should be done by e-mail directly to us.
