Distributed AI Agents for Cognitive Underwater Robot Autonomy
This work advances underwater robot autonomy by providing a scalable and versatile framework that could generalize to various real-world applications, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing AI and robotics technologies.
The paper tackles the challenge of achieving robust cognitive autonomy in robots navigating complex environments by introducing UROSA, a distributed AI agent architecture integrated with ROS 2, which demonstrated significant advantages over traditional rule-based systems in handling unforeseen scenarios and uncertainties in underwater missions.
Achieving robust cognitive autonomy in robots navigating complex, unpredictable environments remains a fundamental challenge in robotics. This paper presents Underwater Robot Self-Organizing Autonomy (UROSA), a groundbreaking architecture leveraging distributed Large Language Model AI agents integrated within the Robot Operating System 2 (ROS 2) framework to enable advanced cognitive capabilities in Autonomous Underwater Vehicles. UROSA decentralises cognition into specialised AI agents responsible for multimodal perception, adaptive reasoning, dynamic mission planning, and real-time decision-making. Central innovations include flexible agents dynamically adapting their roles, retrieval-augmented generation utilising vector databases for efficient knowledge management, reinforcement learning-driven behavioural optimisation, and autonomous on-the-fly ROS 2 node generation for runtime functional extensibility. Extensive empirical validation demonstrates UROSA's promising adaptability and reliability through realistic underwater missions in simulation and real-world deployments, showing significant advantages over traditional rule-based architectures in handling unforeseen scenarios, environmental uncertainties, and novel mission objectives. This work not only advances underwater autonomy but also establishes a scalable, safe, and versatile cognitive robotics framework capable of generalising to a diverse array of real-world applications.