Market-based approach for multi-team robot cooperation

Abstract

The scalability of market-based approaches in multi-robot system coordination enables an assigned task to be decomposed into subcomponents achievable by individuals or subteams within the team. However, in some potential multi-robot system applications, particularly search and rescue operations, this can involve deployment of multiple teams of robots from different parties to work side by side. Each team of robots is independently managed by its operator. A loose collaboration among teams of robots is needed to increase the efficiency of a task completion. This work presents a variant architecture of multi-robot systems using Contract Net Protocol to address the coordination among multiple teams of robots. The system is named a multi-team robot system. It places emphasis on a team's data security in communication where each team operates on a respective communication network while maintaining their collaboration. The method of task coordination is explained in detail and verified on a physical mobile robot platform.