Well, I was thinking that a fun multirobotics project would be to have robots that were trash cans and their goals would be:
- Minimize expected time to find a trashcan
- Stay out of the way
- When full empty into “dumpster” or something
- Stay charged
- Minimal movement (don’t move when someone is using it)
- (Some sort of tipping defense mechanism?)
They might be outfitted with the ability to identify and suck up trash (like a vacuum). They would have to coordinate so that they did not cluster. They would learn roles and adapt to changes in the number of robots.
This multirobot trash can could be used at high traffic events or locations. I guess the big thing is that people might actually steal the trash can! We would need body guards for the trash can haha ;). I do realize that this is sort of like the room clearing problem for multiple robots, so I’m thinking that some techniques that have been developed could be applied to solve this problem.
I call them CoWs, Cooperative Waste-cans :).
So, water and sewer plants when there are multiples that must cooperate to serve a community. Then the plants would be the agents and they could each communicate with the others to coordinate how/who/when they would do things. This would reduce risk by distributing the system. It is also agent based because the plants are selfish. It is not a distributed problem because the facilities may be different companies.
They mush cooperate to take better care of the environment (over taxing the river where the water comes) and customers. I wonder who owns the sewer pipes then? Would this be a traveling repairman problem? So, it would have to be distributed due to the joint ownership of the pipes by different companies, but separate management of the repairmen?
In the creation of the city that would also be an interesting problem of determining all the sewer layout and design… This seems like a Ford-Fulkerson solution with a Traveling Repairman problem and TSP. So, essentially we could evolve different pipe networks so that when the roads get built on top we will have created the best possible network with the given simulated info at the time.