A multiagent robot language for communication and concurrency control

The paper presents a programming language, Multiagent Robot Language (MRL), for communication with and control of robotic agents, including physical robots and sensors. While robotic agents can perform their own tasks, task level cooperation allows them to perform more complex tasks that cannot be achieved by a single robot. MRL provides an integrated framework for concurrency control, emergent event handling, and negotiation of distributed robotic agents in a declarative manner. MRL is an executable specification language for multiagent robot control, since MRL programs are transformed into a set of guarded Horn clauses (parallel logic programs running on parallel computers). This feature provides both low and semantic level distributed control to enable intelligent cooperation between physical agents; this new approach incorporates concurrent control facilities into distributed AI and agent oriented programming systems.