Multi-robot Cooperation : Architectures and Paradigms

This paper presents a generic architecture for the operation of a team of autonomous robots to achieve complex missions. Its interest stems from its ability to provide a framework for cooperative decisional processes at different levels : high level plan synthesis, task allocation and task achievement. It is based on a combination of local individual planning and coordinated decision for incremental plan adaptation to the multi-robot context. Indeed, we claim that it is often possible (and useful) to treat these three issues separately. As we will see, this levels deal with problems of different nature, leading to specific representations, algorithms and protocols