Collective Decision-Theoretic Planning for Planet Exploration

In this paper, we describe an approach of platoon formation for planet exploration like problems. In such problems, the agents have partial observability about their environment (using on-board sensors), must deal with uncertain outcomes of their actions (a wheel could slip) and can not communicate (it uses too much energy). In order to address those limitations, we use 2V-DEC-MDP: this model deals with such problems and uses local interactions between agents instead of explicit coordinations. First, we describe how to use specific flocking rules in a 2V-DEC-MDP to build a platoon shape. Second, we use the stochastic games theory to analyze the optimality of our approach. Then, we show how we can effectively compute good policies with a low complexity. We finally give a practical usage example of our approach, on a platooning problem.