A Market Approach to Multirobot Coordination

Abstract

The coordination of a large group of robots to solve a specified task is a difficult problem.Centralized approaches can be computationally intractable, brittle, and unresponsive to change.Distributed approaches are not as prone to these problems, but they can be highly sub-optimal.This work introduces a novel economic approach for coordinating robots based on the free market system.The free market approach defines revenue and cost functions across the possible plans for executing a specified task.The task is accomplished by dividing it into sub-tasks and allowing the robots to bid and negotiate to carry out these sub-tasks.Cooperation and competition emerge as the robots execute the task while trying to maximize their personal profits.Initial simulation results indicate the approach is successful at producing effective global plans for a team of several robots performing an interior sensing task.