Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Beaver, Logan E.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.15621
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866929635691855872
author Beaver, Logan E.
author_facet Beaver, Logan E.
contents In this article we address the multi-robot task allocation problem, where robots must cooperatively assign themselves to accomplish a set of tasks. We consider the colony maintenance problem as an example, where a team of robots are tasked with continuously maintaining the energy supply of a central colony. We model this as a global game, where each robot measures the energy level of the colony, and the current number of assigned robots, to determine whether or not to forage for energy sources. The key to our approach is introducing a negative feedback term into the robots' utility, which also eliminates the trivial solution where foraging or not foraging are strictly dominant strategies. We compare our approach qualitatively to existing an global games approach, where a positive positive feedback term admits threshold-based decision making that encourages many robots to forage. We discuss how positive feedback can lead to a cascading failure when robots are removed from the system, and we demonstrate the resilience of our approach in simulation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2403_15621
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Multi-Robot Task Allocation using Global Games with Negative Feedback: The Colony Maintenance Problem
Beaver, Logan E.
Robotics
In this article we address the multi-robot task allocation problem, where robots must cooperatively assign themselves to accomplish a set of tasks. We consider the colony maintenance problem as an example, where a team of robots are tasked with continuously maintaining the energy supply of a central colony. We model this as a global game, where each robot measures the energy level of the colony, and the current number of assigned robots, to determine whether or not to forage for energy sources. The key to our approach is introducing a negative feedback term into the robots' utility, which also eliminates the trivial solution where foraging or not foraging are strictly dominant strategies. We compare our approach qualitatively to existing an global games approach, where a positive positive feedback term admits threshold-based decision making that encourages many robots to forage. We discuss how positive feedback can lead to a cascading failure when robots are removed from the system, and we demonstrate the resilience of our approach in simulation.
title Multi-Robot Task Allocation using Global Games with Negative Feedback: The Colony Maintenance Problem
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.15621