Title
Using critical junctures and environmentally-dependent information for management of tightly-coupled cooperation in heterogeneous robot teams
Abstract
This paper addresses the challenge of forming appropriate heterogeneous robot teams to solve tightly-coupled, potentially multi-robot tasks, in which the robot capabilities may vary over the environment in which the task is being performed. Rather than making use of a permanent tightly-coupled robot team for performing the task, our approach aims to recognize when tight coupling is needed, and then only form tight cooperative teams at those times. This results in important cost savings, since coordination is only used when the independent operation of the team members would put mission success at risk. Our approach is to define a new semantic information type, called environmentally dependent information, which allows us to capture certain environmentally-dependent perceptual constraints on vehicle capabilities. We define locations at which the robot team must transition between tight and weak cooperation as critical junctures. Note that these critical juncture points are a function of the robot team capabilities and the environmental characteristics, and are not due to a change in the task itself. We calculate critical juncture points by making use of our prior ASyMTRe approach, which can automatically configure heterogeneous robot team solutions to enable sharing of sensory capabilities across robots. We demonstrate these concepts in experiments involving a human-controlled blimp and an autonomous ground robot in a target localization task.
Year
DOI
Venue
2009
10.1109/ROBOT.2009.5152635
Kobe
Keywords
Field
DocType
mobile robots,multi-robot systems,critical juncture,environmentally-dependent information,heterogeneous robot team,potentially multirobot task,robot vehicle,tightly-coupled cooperation
Blimp,Juncture,Information management,Robot kinematics,Control engineering,Semantic information,Human–computer interaction,Artificial intelligence,Engineering,Robot,Perception,Mobile robot
Conference
Volume
Issue
ISSN
2009
1
1050-4729 E-ISBN : 978-1-4244-2789-5
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
978-1-4244-2789-5
1
0.39
References 
Authors
11
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Lynne E. Parker11233132.54
Christopher Reardon2739.46
Heeten Choxi310.39
Corney Bolden410.39