Distributed Coordination in Heterogeneous Multi-Robot Systems

  • Authors:

  • Luca Iocchi;Daniele Nardi;Maurizio Piaggio;Antonio Sgorbissa

  • Affiliations:

  • Dipartimento di Informatica e Sistemistica, Università di Roma “La Sapienza”, Via Salaria 113, 00198, Roma, Italy. iocchi@dis.uniroma1.it;Dipartimento di Informatica e Sistemistica, Università di Roma “La Sapienza”, Via Salaria 113, 00198, Roma, Italy. nardi@dis.uniroma1.it;Dept. of Communication, Computer and System Sciences, Università di Genova, Via Opera Pia 13, 16125 Genova, Italy. piaggio@dist.unige.it;Dept. of Communication, Computer and System Sciences, Università di Genova, Via Opera Pia 13, 16125 Genova, Italy. sgorbissa@dist.unige.it

  • Venue:
  • Autonomous Robots
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

Coordination in multi-robot systems is a very active research field in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, since through coordination one can achieve a more effective execution of the robots' tasks. In this paper we present an approach to distributed coordination of a multi-robot system that is based on dynamic role assignment. The approach relies on the broadcast communication of utility functions that define the capability for every robot to perform a task and on the execution of a coordination protocol for dynamic role assignment. The presented method is robust to communication failures and suitable for application in dynamic environments. In addition to experimental results showing the effectiveness of our approach, the method has been successfully implemented within the team of heterogeneous robots Azzurra Robot Team in a very dynamic hostile environment provided by the RoboCup robotic soccer competitions.