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Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute

This paper presents an architecture that enables multiple robots to explicitly coordinate actions at multiple levels of abstraction. In particular, we are developing an extension to the traditional three-layered robot architecture that enables robots to interact directly at each layer -- at the behavioral level, the robots can create distributed control loops; at the executive level, they can synchronize task execution; at the planning level, we are investigating the use of market-based techniques for team formation, resource allocation, and role assignment. We illustrate these ideas through applications in multi-robot assembly, multi-robot deployment, and multi-robot mapping.

Keywords

Multi-robot coordination, robot architecture, task-level control

Notes

Associated Lab(s) / Group(s): Reliable Autonomous Systems Lab

Associated Project(s): Federation of Intelligent Robotic Explorers Project

Text Reference

Reid Simmons, Trey Smith, M Bernardine Dias, Dani Goldberg, David Hershberger, Anthony (Tony) Stentz, and Robert Michael Zlot, "A Layered Architecture for Coordination of Mobile Robots," Multi-Robot Systems: From Swarms to Intelligent Automata, Proceedings from the 2002 NRL Workshop on Multi-Robot Systems, May, 2002.

BibTeX Reference

@inproceedings{Simmons_2002_4135,
   author = "Reid Simmons and Trey Smith and M Bernardine Dias and Dani Goldberg and David Hershberger and Anthony (Tony) Stentz and Robert Michael Zlot",
   editor = "Alan C. Schultz, Lynne E. Parker",
   title = "A Layered Architecture for Coordination of Mobile Robots",
   booktitle = "Multi-Robot Systems: From Swarms to Intelligent Automata, Proceedings from the 2002 NRL Workshop on Multi-Robot Systems",
   publisher = "Kluwer Academic Publishers",
   month = "May",
   year = "2002",
}

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