Distributes award protocol: A cooperation and communication method for robots.

摘要

In this Master’s Thesis a new Distributed Award Protocol (DAP) for robot communication andudcooperation is presented. Task assignment (contract awarding) is done dynamically withudcontracts assigned to robots based upon the best bid received.udInstead of having a manager and a contractor it is proposed a fully distributed bidding/awardingudmechanism without a distinguished master. The best bidding robots are awarded with contractudfor execution. The contractors make decisions locally. This brings the following benefits: noudcommunication bottleneck, low computational power requirement, increased robustness.udDAP can handle multitasking. Tasks can be injected into system during the execution of alreadyudallocated tasks. As tasks have priorities, in the next cycle after taking into account actual bidudparameters of all robots, tasks can be re-allocated. The aim is to minimize a global cost functionudwhich is a compromise between cost of task execution and cost of resources usage.udInformation about tasks and bid values is spread among robots with the use of a Round RobinudRoute, which is a novel solution proposed in this work. This method allows also identifyingudfailed robots. Such failed robot is eliminated from the list of awarded robots and its replacementudis found so the task is still executed by a team. If the failure of a robot was temporary (e.g.udcommunication noise) and the robot can recover, it can again participate in the nextudbidding/awarding process.udUsing a bidding/awarding mechanism allows robots to dynamically relocate among tasks. This isudalso contributes to system robustness.udDAP was evaluated through multiple experiments done in the multi-robot simulation system. Various scenarios were tested to check the idea of the main algorithm. Different failures of robots (communication failures, partial hardware malfunctions) were simulated and observations were made regarding how DAP recovers from them. Also the DAPudflexibility to environment changes was watched. The experiments in the simulated environment confirmed the above features of DAP.