Multi-Robot Foraging Based on Contract Net Protocol

Because of high speed, efficiency, robustness and flexibility of multi-agent systems, in recent years there has been an increasing interest in the art of these systems. In competitive multi agent systems, a mechanism is required via which the agents can come to reach an agreement. Contract net protocols are one of the well-known negotiation protocols in multi-agent systems. In contract net protocol, each agent can be a manager or a contractor. The managers announce available tasks and the contractors bid over the tasks. Then, the managers investigate received bids and decide which contractor could perform the task. The decision is made based on an eligibility function. In this paper, a multi robot foraging problem is considered where mobile robots with limited energy resource try to transport some moving objects to a collection point. The problem is modeled as a contract net system and then solved. Efficiency of the algorithm and optimality of solutions are investigated by provided examples and simulations.