Today's leading chip and system companies are faced with ever increasing design verification challenges; industry studies reveal that as much as 50% of the total schedule is being spent in verification. Large companies, with almost infinite resources, have shown that throwing CPU cycles and people at the simulation problem still doesn't guarantee a level of coverage desired by the design team.

A novel framework for multiple robot cooperation called "cooperation by observation" is presented. It introduces many interesting issues such as a viewpoint constraint and role interchange, as well as novel concepts like "attentional structure". The framework has the potential to realize a high level of task coordination by decentralized autonomous robots allowing minimum explicit communication. Its source of power lies in an advanced capability given to each robot for recognizing other agent's actions by (primarily visual) observation. This provides rich information about the current task situation around each robot which facilitates highly-structured task coordination. The basic visuo-motor routines are described. Concrete examples and experiments using real mobile robots are also presented.>

This paper presents some advanced examples of reactive vision-based cooperative behaviors: 1) chasing and posing against another robot among others; 2) unblocking the path of another robot by removing an obstacle; and 3) passing an object from one to another. These behaviors are demonstrated using real mobile robots equipped with CCD cameras, in a complex environment, and with no central controller or explicit communication among the robots. The action observation is based on real time processing of optical flow analysis and stereo tracking. An extended behavior-based architecture for "cooperation by observation" is presented. The core extension consists of a mobile space buffer and an image space buffer with manipulable markers which control the internal flow of information, thereby coordinating parallel behaviors and achieving purposive tasks in complex and dynamic environments.>