A Physically Grounded Approach to Coordinate Movements in a Team

This paper focuses on the problems of coordinating the movements of a cooperative team in an environment, and proposes an approach that takes inspiration from the laws of physics. Our idea is to have the movements members driven by abstract force fields, generated by team members themselves (i.e., by carriedon devices) and propagated via some embedded infrastructure (or by team members in an ad-hoc way). A globally coordinated and self-organized behavior in team members’ movements emerges due to the interrelated effects of team members following the shape of the fields and of dynamic fields re-shaping. A case study in the area of warehouse management is introduced to exemplify the proposed approach.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2002
• Where: ICDCSW
• Authors: Letizia Leonardi, Marco Mamei, Franco Zambonelli
• Keywords: Abstract Force Fields, Distributed And Parallel Computing, ICDCSW 2002, Movements Members, Team Members