Principled Communication for Dynamic Multi robot Task Allocation

Abstract

In the pursuit of an efficient cooperative multi-robot system, the researcher must eventually answer the question how should robots communicate?; a natural way to attack this question is to decompose it into three simpler corollaries: what should robots communicate?, when should they communicate? and with whom should they communicate?. In this paper, we propose answers to these questions in the form of a general framework for inter-robot communication and, more specifically, advocate its use in dynamic task allocation for teams of cooperative mobile robots. We base our communication model on publish/subscribe messaging and validate our system by using it in a tightly-coupled multi-robot manipulation task and a loosely-coupled long-term experiment involving many robots concurrently executing different tasks.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jan 01, 2001
Accession Number
AD1022036

Entities

People

  • Brian P. Gerkey
  • Maja Matarić

Organizations

  • University of Southern California

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Autonomy

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Information Science
  • Robotic Swarms
  • Robotics
  • Robots

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Agent-Based Social Robotics and Mobile-Assisted Learning in Virtual Environments.
  • Database Systems and Applications

Technology Areas

  • AI & ML
  • AI & ML - Autonomous Systems
  • AI & ML - Information Retrieval
  • Autonomy