Enhancing the awareness of decentralized cooperative mobile robots through active perceptual anchoring

In this paper, we describe a system for controlling the perceptual processes of two cooperative mobile robots that addresses the issue of enhancing perceptual awareness. We define awareness here as knowing the location of other robots in the environment. The proposed system benefits from a formalism called perceptual anchoring. Here, perceptual anchoring enhances the awareness of the system by employing an anchor-based active gaze control strategy or active perceptual anchoring to control the perceptual effort according to what is important at a given time. By anchoring we extend the notion of awareness as knowing what the symbols in the control module represent to by connecting them to the objects or features in the environment. We demonstrate the present system through a simulation of two nonholonomic mobile robots performing a cooperative transportation by carrying a cargo to a target location where there are two other robots moving about. The system is able to efficiently focus the perceptual effort and thus able to safely carry the cargo to the target position.