FAQ

• There is no strict definition about what an agent is. Literature offers a variety of definitions ranging from the simple to the lengthy and demanding ones. All available definitions are strongly biased by the background field interested in agent technology instead to list and elaborate different definitions, two definitions of the agent coming from artificial intelligence and software engineering are given here since they seem to be rather general, widely accepted by different research communities, and closest to people perception of agents. In artificial intelligence, an agent is defined as follows,

“An agent is anything that can be viewed as perceiving its environment through sensors and acting upon that environment through effectors”

• Often an agent is a combination of a physical entity (computational architecture) and a virtual one (a piece of software running on the computational architecture). A more precise definition of the agent, that is in fact extension of the definition mentioned above, is given in software engineering,

“Autonomous agents are computational systems that inhabit some complex dynamic environment, sense and act autonomously in this environment, and by doing so realize a set of goals or tasks for which they are deigned”

As for the definition of an agent the same holds for definition of a multi-agent system. Various definitions have been proposed depending on research discipline it is coming from a single definition is chosen that seems to be general .a multi-agent system is defined as,

“A multi-agent system is a loosely coupled network of problem-solving entities (agents) that work together to find answers to problems that are beyond the individual capabilities or knowledge of each entity (agent)”

Robot Operating System, or ROS for short, is a Robotics middle-ware and a collection of software frameworks for robot software development. Even though ROS is not an operating system, it provides services designed for heterogeneous computer clusters such as hardware abstraction, low-level device control, implementation of commonly used functionality, message-passing between processes, and package management.

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