A Layered Architecture for Coordination of Mobile Robots

Abstract

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.