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.
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This work was sponsored by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory, under contract “Robotics Collaborative Technology Alliance” (contract number DAAD19-01-2-0012). The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the official policies or endorsements of the U.S. Government.
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Jones, E.G., Dias, M.B. & Stentz, A. Time-extended multi-robot coordination for domains with intra-path constraints. Auton Robot 30, 41–56 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10514-010-9202-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10514-010-9202-3