Decentralized consensus-making mechanisms based on immune system - application to a behavior arbitration of an autonomous mobile robot

Conventional artificial intelligent (AI) system have been criticized for its brittleness under hostile/dynamic changing environments. Therefore, recently much attention has been focused on the reactive planning systems such as behavior-based AI. However, in the behavior-based AI approaches, how to construct a mechanism that realizes adequate arbitration among competence modules is still an open question. In this paper, we propose a new decentralized consensus-making system inspired from the biological immune system. And we apply our proposed method to a behavior arbitration of an autonomous mobile robot as a practical example. To verify the feasibility of our method, we carry out some experiments. In addition, we propose an adaptation mechanism, and try to construct a suitable immune network for adequate action selection.