Peter Shikli and Karan Kamdar founded RoboTeamX to develop the capabilities of robots to work on a team.

Whereas the literature is full of robots doing amazing things, robots have so far operated as single entities, replacing a single human when the work is dangerous, tedious, or more expensive. More than one robot, cooperating to accomplish this has so far not been done to our knowledge, at least not to where such robotic cooperation was the focus of the technology.

Such cooperation, which in many ways may seem innate to humans, is actually a complex interaction of parallel processing, communication, arbitration, consensus building, and resource allocation. Technology to apply such concepts to autonomous robots is in its infancy.

Our first step was to build a robotic chess set using resin chess pieces with a 2-ft tall king, with the possibility that we may upgrade to fiberglass chess pieces with a 6-ft tall king in the future. Besides their size, the key difference is that each of these chess pieces has its own independent processor calculating the next game move. RoboTeamX developed a robotic synergy language CRACL, pronounced crackle) for Cooperative Robotic Arbitration and Command Language. In this case, CRACL decides on the best game move in the majority of cases where the chess pieces differ in their move recommendations.

The RoboTeamX rollout was an actual robot vs. human chess game. Make no mistake, these robots are autonomous from human control and autonomous from each other. This was not a computer-controlled chess game (a la Boris, Deep Blue, etc). This was a team of robots, working within the structured boundaries of chess game rules to try to achieve their collective objective. They made their moves and advised the humans to make theirs. Play was on a giant chess board with 2-ft wide squares instrumented to sense the movement of the humans.

To make life interesting, the humans facing them were operating by the same rules, by a similar need to cooperate to make their move. They were not controlled by a chess master in a chair overlooking the game. They had to communicate, arbitrate, and come up with the human team's move before their clock ran out.

A UCLA engineer with an MBA, Peter Shikli has over 25 years in software development, high-tech business development, and project management. He is a Certified Manufacturing Engineer, a Registered Professional Engineer, accredited college instructor, guest lecturer, and has published over 40 articles & books.

Mr. Shikli's experience includes VP of R&D, CIO for an electronic component exchange, various high-tech positions with Garrett Aerospace and Ampex, and Program Manager for SAIC, the world's largest international think tank. Having founded Bizware, Mr. Shikli chaired various internet consortiums such as the Orange County Chapter of the Southern California ColdFusion Users Group, the Orange County PHP Developers Group, Director of the WebTeam Coalition, and the Internet Consortium of the Orange County Business Council.

Mr. Shikli is currently the CEO of Bizware Online Applications, Inc and its subsidiary MegaChess.

Karan Kamdar earned a master's degree through the Arts, Computation, Engineering (ACE) Program in the field of cooperating robots from the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) Department of the University of California at Irvine.

Mr. Karan is the chief architect of the CRACL language for synergistic robotics, and he built the testbed using the chess robots to demonstrate it.