The Robotics Institute

Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute

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Abstract

The best laid plans of robots and men often go awry. In dangerous and uncertain environments initial plans must be revised as robots fail, additional robots join the team, robots discover inconsistencies in their model of the problem, etc. Communication failures hamper this replanning. We introduce fractured subteams as a novel formalism for modeling breakdowns in communication. We present a hybrid approach that employs distributed coordination mechanisms to provide robustness to these communication breakdowns and exploits opportunistic centralization. By modeling the problem as a mixed integer linear programming problem, we are able to apply constraint optimization techniques to efficiently find optimal or near optimal solutions to the difficult class of time critical tight coordination team planning problems. We then demonstrate that explicitly reasoning about communication failures through the incorporation of selective disruption minimization significantly improves team performance.

Keywords

Multirobot coordination, Integer Linear Programming, Communication failure

Notes

Sponsor: NSF

Grant ID: Menlo Park, CA

Associated Center(s) / Consortia: Center for Integrated Manfacturing Decision Systems

Associated Lab(s) / Group(s): Advanced Agent - Robotics Technology Lab

Number of pages: 8

Text Reference

Mary Koes, Katia Sycara, and Illah Nourbakhsh, "Best Laid Plans of Robots and Men," AAAI Spring Symposium on Distributed Plan and Schedule Management, March, 2006, pp. 49-56.

BibTeX Reference

@inproceedings{Koes_2006_5407,
   author = "Mary Koes and Katia Sycara and Illah Nourbakhsh",
   editor = "Edmund Durfee and David Musliner",
   title = "Best Laid Plans of Robots and Men",
   booktitle = "AAAI Spring Symposium on Distributed Plan and Schedule Management",
   pages = "49-56",
   publisher = "AAAI Press",
   address = "Menlo Park, CA",
   month = "March",
   year = "2006",
   number= "SS-06-04",
}

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