SCIENCE@home

Time-extended multi-robot coordination for domains with intra-path constraints

E. Jones,M. Dias,A. Stentz

Published 2011 in Auton. Robots

ABSTRACT

Many applications require teams of robots to cooperatively execute tasks. Among these domains are those in which successful coordination must respect intra-path constraints, which are constraints that occur on the paths of agents and affect route planning. This work focuses on multi-agent coordination for disaster response with intra-path precedence constraints, a compelling application that is not well addressed by current coordination methods. In this domain a group of fire truck agents attempt to address fires spread throughout a city in the wake of a large-scale disaster. The disaster has also caused many city roads to be blocked by impassable debris, which can be cleared by bulldozer robots. A high-quality coordination solution must determine not only a task allocation but also what routes the fire trucks should take given the intra-path precedence constraints and which bulldozers should be assigned to clear debris along those routes.This work presents two methods for generating time-extended coordination solutions—solutions where more than one task is assigned to each agent—for domains with intra-path constraints. Our first approach uses tiered auctions and two heuristic techniques, clustering and opportunistic path planning, to perform a bounded search of possible time-extended schedules and allocations. Our second method uses a centralized, non-heuristic, genetic algorithm-based approach that provides higher quality solutions but at substantially greater computational cost. We compare our time-extended approaches with a range of single task allocation approaches in a simulated disaster response domain.

PUBLICATION RECORD

  • Publication year

    2011

  • Venue

    Auton. Robots

  • Publication date

    Unknown publication date

  • Fields of study

    Computer Science, Engineering, Environmental Science

  • Identifiers
    DOI 10.1007/s10514-010-9202-3
  • External record

    Open on Semantic Scholar

  • Source metadata

    Semantic Scholar

CITATION MAP

EXTRACTION MAP

CLAIMS

  • No claims are published for this paper.

CONCEPTS

  • No concepts are published for this paper.

REFERENCES

Showing 1-20 of 20 references · Page 1 of 1

CITED BY

Showing 1-98 of 98 citing papers · Page 1 of 1