IO, GANYMEDE, and CALLISTO

The Georgia Institute of Technology won the Office Cleanup event at the 1994 AAAI Robot Competition and Exhibition with a multirobot cooperating team. This article describes the design and implementation of these reactive trash-collecting robots, including details of multiagent cooperation, color vision for the detection of perceptual object classes, temporal sequencing of behaviors for task completion, and a language for specifying motor schema-based robot behaviors. The 10-pound robots were built using off-theshelf components at a cost of approximately $1700 each. The chassis sits atop a motorized base purchased as a radio-controlled-model kit. Each robot is equipped with bumper sensors, a miniature color camera, and a specially designed mechanical gripper.