The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Oct. 21, 2003
Filed:
May. 22, 2002
Wei-Min Shen, Rancho Palos Verdes, CA (US);
Behnam Salemi, Los Angeles, CA (US);
Peter Will, Los Altos Hills, CA (US);
University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA (US);
Abstract
Systems and techniques are described for distributed control and coordination of autonomous agents in a system. A protocol for distributed control allows autonomous agents to negotiate a group task for the agents, such as locomotion or self-reconfiguration in a robot application, and to synchronize individual agent actions to effect the group task. A protocol for adaptive communication allows autonomous agents, such as physically coupled self-sufficient robot modules, to continuously discover changes in their local topology. In general, in one implementation, the technique includes: discovering a local topology, which includes a type of a communication connection to autonomous agents in the reconfigurable network topology, and determining an action based upon a received control message and the determined local topology.