Multi-Robot Item Delivery and Foraging: Two Sides of a Coin

Robotics

Somchaya Liemhetcharat¹  Rui Yan²  Keng Peng Tee²  Matthew Lee² 

[1] Institute for Infocomm Research, Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), Singapore 138632, Singapore;

关键词: multi-robot;    robot team;    distributed;    item delivery;    foraging;    world model;   

DOI  :  10.3390/robotics4030365

来源: mdpi

【 摘 要 】

Multi-robot foraging has been widely studied in the literature, and the general assumption is that the robots are simple, i.e., with limited processing and carrying capacity. We previously studied continuous foraging with slightly more capable robots, and in this article, we are interested in using similar robots for item delivery. Interestingly, item delivery and foraging are two sides of the same coin: foraging an item from a location is similar to satisfying a demand. We formally define the multi-robot item delivery problem and show that the continuous foraging problem is a special case of it. We contribute distributed multi-robot algorithms that solve the item delivery and foraging problems and describe how our shared world model is synchronized across the multi-robot team. We performed extensive experiments on simulated robots using a Java simulator, and we present our results to demonstrate that we outperform benchmark algorithms from multi-robot foraging.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© 2015 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.