Abstract
This paper presents the implementation of a 3D virtual environment VE as an interactive collaboration environment between a team of agents. This team can include human operators and robots all at different physical locations. The use of a 3D VE as a virtual Blackboard and a virtual world has shown to be useful in order to allow the human operator to: a) observe the emergent behaviour of the robots inside both the real and virtual world, b) allow for user interaction, real time monitoring, and c) qualitatively assess the agents' behaviour and interactively issue a relevant decision through the virtual blackboard. A set of experiments was being run and aimed at testing the representation of the agents' behaviours as a combination of the local and global communications in four layers. It is proposed that these four layers can be used to encode more complex behaviours allowing LIS to test different communication modes and the corresponding behaviour levels. The work presented in this paper shows the integration between virtual networks using blackboard negotiation technique in addition to the flocking algorithm to model the proposed communication modes between human operators and robots. This integration between the virtual and real networks features four main aspects: a) an increased level of presence and immersion within the simulation that helped,gain an increased level of understanding of the agents behaviour inside the world; b) enabling a user interaction by flying around the agents and observing and monitoring the agents' actions, and c) combining the realism and reality of the agents behaviours which is of great importance for ability to control the real physical robots from different physical locations allowed for easy fault detecting and for real-world problems to be tested and seen in an easy and understandable manner.