Multiple Robot Teaming: Coalition Formation: from Software Agents to Robots

As the community strives towards more autonomous multi-robot systems, the complexity of actions expected from a multiple robot system has increased significantly. Current tasks entail that a large set of heterogeneous robots dynamically partition themselves into coalitions and perform joint team tasks. An important contribution of this book is to highlight the difficulties involved in transitioning coalition formation algorithms from multi-agent to multi-robot systems. Novel algorithms of interest to researchers are provided and demonstrated with real world robots. The notion of balance in a multiple robot team is introduced and its relationship with team performance is investigated with intention of extrapolating the results to human teams. Finally the book introduces a novel economy based coalition formation system based on multi-unit combinatorial auctions and makes a comparative analysis with the heuristic approach. The book includes an exhaustive literature survey of multiple robot coordination and cooperation techniques present in the literature and offers a solid introduction to the field for a newbie.