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A decentralized approach to cooperative situation assessment in multi-robot systems

Published: 12 May 2008 Publication History

Abstract

To act effectively under uncertainty, multi-robot teams need to accurately estimate the state of the environment. Although individual robots, with uncertain sensors, may not be able to accurately determine the current situation, the team as a whole should have the capability to perform situation assessment. However, sharing all information with all other team mates is not scalable nor is centralization of all information possible. This paper presents a decentralized approach to cooperative situation assessment that balances use of communication bandwidth with the need for good situation assessment. When a robot believes locally that a particular plan should be executed, it sends a proposal for that plan, to one of its team mates. The robot receiving the plan proposal, can either agree with the plan and forward it on, or it can provide sensor information to suggest that an alternative plan might have higher expected utility. Once sufficient robots agree with the proposal, the plan is initiated. The algorithm successfully balances the value of cooperative sensing against the cost of sharing large volumes of information. Experiments verify the utility of the approach, showing that the algorithm dramatically out-performs individual decision-making and obtains performance similar to a centralized approach.

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cover image ACM Conferences
AAMAS '08: Proceedings of the 7th international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems - Volume 1
May 2008
565 pages
ISBN:9780981738109

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International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems

Richland, SC

Publication History

Published: 12 May 2008

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Author Tags

  1. cooperative perception
  2. robotics
  3. situation assessment

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View all
  • (2012)An agent-based model of the Battle of IsandlwanaProceedings of the Winter Simulation Conference10.5555/2429759.2430037(1-12)Online publication date: 9-Dec-2012
  • (2009)An automated approach for generating project execution modes with multi-skilled workforce coalition formationProceedings of the 10th IEEE international conference on Information Reuse & Integration10.5555/1689250.1689322(400-404)Online publication date: 10-Aug-2009

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