A Constraint Optimization Framework for Fractured Robot Teams

Abstract

In dangerous and uncertain environments initial plans must be revised. Communication failures hamper this replanning. We introduce fractured subteams as a novel formalism for modeling breakdowns in communication. We present a hy- brid approach that employs distributed coordination mech- anisms to provide robustness to these communication break- downs and exploits opportunistic centralization. By mod- eling the problem as a mixed integer linear programming problem, we are able to apply constraint optimization tech- niques 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 incor- poration of selective disruption minimization can improve team performance.