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Emergent bucket brigading - a simple mechanism for improving performance in multi-robot constrainedspace foraging tasks
- In Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Autonomous Agents
, 2001
"... ABSTRACT This paper is concerned with the multi-robot foraging problem, which has been described as one of the canonical problems for cooperative robotics. In particular, the multi-robot transportation task in constrained space environments is considered. We describe a simple algorithm which produce ..."
Abstract
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Cited by 18 (2 self)
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ABSTRACT This paper is concerned with the multi-robot foraging problem, which has been described as one of the canonical problems for cooperative robotics. In particular, the multi-robot transportation task in constrained space environments is considered. We describe a simple algorithm which produces bucket brigade-like behavior, where the robots "hand off " resources to each other, using only local sensing. The algorithm is tested in five experimental conditions, to empirically evaluate the strengths/weaknesses of the approach, and is found to perform significantly better in constrained space environments than a homogeneous foraging approach. The key results of the described work are: 1) a framework for foraging tasks in general and 2) a simple mechanism that acts locally to produce bucket brigading behavior globally. 1. INTRODUCTION Foraging is considered one of the "canonical test beds for cooperative robotics " [4]. In this paper, we focus on multirobot foraging, specifically considering the special case of multiple robots transporting items from a single source to a single sink in a spatially constrained environment. The multi-robot foraging task have been studied by many researchers. In several of the studies, interference between robots has been reported to be a key issue [8], [5] and [11] and several different mechanisms has been used to reduce negative effects caused by interference [13]. One goal of our work in progress is to find methods to reduce the negative effect of interference in the multi-robot domain, in order to allow for greater scalability with respect to group size.

