Affection based multi-robot team work

Abstract

Multi-robot task allocation, cooperation and interaction among the members of a team are very complex topics that need to be explored more. A task can be accomplished by a multi-robot team with required performance and reliability being operated with a proper cooperative plan. A proper cooperative plan includes an intelligent task allocation method in a productive and efficient manner such that the assigned task to the team is performed with a level of performance satisfaction. The robots need to be intelligent enough to dynamically adjust with changing workload either by changing actions or by making new cooperative plan. In this chapter, we describe proposed approaches to multi-robot task allocation and cooperation in a chronological way such that they can be studied and compared for future development with affection based augmentation. In respect of some drawbacks (like high communication overhead, dead lock, etc) with the existing approaches, we present the affection based task allocation and cooperation that has been used for a very few cases. We also present the complexity of the affective method and give some hints to compensate the complexity problems. Later on, we present also a stochastic approach for affection based task allocation, cooperation and interaction for a multi-robot team. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.