Towards Dynamic Team Formation for Robot Ensembles

We present an investigation of dynamic team formation strategies for robot ensembles performing a collection of single and two-robot tasks. Specifically, we consider the abstract “stick and pebble” problem, as a variation of the “stick pulling” problem discussed in the literature. We present a formu...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Mather, T. William, Hsieh, M. Ani, Frazzoli, Emilio
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics
Format: Article
Language:en_US
Published: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers 2011
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/65554
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0505-1400
Description
Summary:We present an investigation of dynamic team formation strategies for robot ensembles performing a collection of single and two-robot tasks. Specifically, we consider the abstract “stick and pebble” problem, as a variation of the “stick pulling” problem discussed in the literature. We present a formulation of the dynamic team formation problem that is independent of ensemble size and develop a macroscopic analytical description of the ensemble dynamics. The macroscopic model is then used to determine the optimal teaming strategy for two different performance metrics. We present agent-based simulation results to support the validity of our macroscopic analysis.