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We have developed an agent's architecture towards the goal of building efficient, robust and safe multi-robot systems considered as cooperating distributed reactive agents. This architecture is based on satisfaction and altruism allowing the agents to amend their low-level behavior like goal seeking and collision avoidance in order to solve more complex problems. We demonstrate in particular that local conflicting and locking situations are automatically avoided or made repulsive. Computer simulations of tasks in complex environments confirm it. The designed mini-robots, the implementation of their architecture, and the communication protocol are described. The same hardware is shared between communication, collision avoidance, and task achievement. Experiments using two mobile robots and a test bed confirm the theoretical and simulation results.

This paper presents a human-scale virtual environment (VE) with haptic feedback along with two experiments performed in the context of product design. The user interacts with a virtual mock-up using a large-scale bimanual string-based haptic interface called SPIDAR (Space Interface Device for Artificial Reality). An original self-calibration method is proposed. A vibro-tactile glove was developed and integrated to the SPIDAR to provide tactile cues to the operator. The purpose of the first experiment was: (1) to examine the effect of tactile feedback in a task involving reach-and-touch of different parts of a digital mock-up, and (2) to investigate the use of sensory substitution in such tasks. The second experiment aimed to investigate the effect of visual and auditory feedback in a car-light maintenance task. Results of the first experiment indicate that the users could easily and quickly access and finely touch the different parts of the digital mock-up when sensory feedback (either visual, auditory, or tactile) was present. Results of the of the second experiment show that visual and auditory feedbacks improve average placement accuracy by about 54 % and 60% respectively compared to the open loop case

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