74 Towards Coordinating Autonomous Robots for Exploration in Dynamic Environments
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Published:2008
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Coordinating multiple robots to achieve a complex task requires solving two distinct control problems: the high-level control problem of ensuring that each robot aims to perform a useful task (e.g., coordination) and the low-level control problem of ensuring that each robot actually performs the correct actions to achieve its task (e.g., navigation and locomotion). Though addressing both problems simultaneously with one algorithm is appealing, this is often difficult to impossible in domains requiring a combination of complex actions (goal selection, navigation, obstacle avoidance). Our results show that deriving robot objectives that are “aligned” with the system objective (e.g., promoting goal selection that contributes to the system objective) becomes crucial when the difficulty of the coordination problem increases: specifically when the signal noise and action stochasticity are at realistic levels.