How a cooperative behaviour can emerge from a robot team

In this paper, we suggest an hybrid architecture where the deliberative part takes advantages from the reactive one and vice versa, to make a multi-robot system to exhibit some assigned cooperative task. We explain our architecture in terms of schemas and a set of firing conditions. To experiment our approach, we have realized an implementation that tries to exploit the resources of our robot team, that participates to the Middle-size RoboCup tournament. Each individual exhibits both reactive and deliberative behaviors which are needed to perform cooperative tasks. To this aim we have designed each robot to become aware of distinguishing configuration patterns in the environment by evaluating descriptive conditions as macroparameters. These are implemented at reactive level, whereas the deliberative level is responsible of a dynamic role assignment among teammates on the basis on the knowledge about the best behavior the team is able to exhibit at the moment. We have tested our approach successfully during the Middle-size Challenge Competition held in Padua on last RobCup2003.