Abstract
In the pursuit of an efficient cooperative multi-robot system, the researcher must eventually answer the question “how should robots communicate?”; a natural way to attack this question is to decompose it into three simpler corollaries: “what should robots communicate?”, “when should they communicate?” and “with whom should they communicate?”. In this paper, we propose answers to these questions in the form of a general framework for inter-robot communication and, more specifically, advocate its use in dynamic task allocation for teams of cooperative mobile robots. We base our communication model on publish/subscribe messaging and validate our system by using it in a tightly-coupled multi-robot manipulaion task and a loosely-coupled long-term experiment involving many robots concurrently executing different tasks.
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Gerkey, B.P., Matarić, M.J. (2001). Principled Communication for Dynamic Multi-Robot Task Allocation. In: Rus, D., Singh, S. (eds) Experimental Robotics VII. Lecture Notes in Control and Information Sciences, vol 271. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45118-8_36
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45118-8_36
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