A team of robots sharing a common goal can benefit from coordination of theactivities of team members, helping the team to reach the goal more reliably orquickly. We address the problem of coordinating the actions of a team of robotswith periodic communication capability executing an information gathering task.We cast the problem as a multi-agent optimal decision-making problem with aninformation theoretic objective function. We show that appropriate techniquesfor solving decentralized partially observable Markov decision processes(Dec-POMDPs) are applicable in such information gathering problems. We quantifythe usefulness of coordinated information gathering through simulation studies,and demonstrate the feasibility of the method in a real-world target trackingdomain.
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