Feedback Coordination of Limited Capability Mobile Robots

In some multi-robot applications, such as exploration, predefined task allocation and coordination can fail to function adequately. This failure is attributed to the inability to completely model a robot´s interactions with the environment before task execution. Hence, the main focus of this paper is on a feedback coordination mechanism that executes periodically after initial task allocation. This feedback mechanism monitors the individual and group performance of worker robots. If the performance of a worker robot is unsatisfactory, a task reallocation algorithm adjusts the task-robot combinations of the team. Three cases of unsatisfactory robot performance that can be detected by the feedback mechanism include: complete failure, partial failure, and poor performance. The task allocation and coordination strategy is applied to a multi-robot exploration task. Initial results from experiments in various types of environments indicate that the feedback coordination mechanism successfully identifies the three forms of robot failure, and improves the system´s performance.