The Multirobot Task Allocation (MRTA) paradigm is widely used in multirobot cooperation schemes, e.g. for observation, surveillance and tracking missions. Market-based approaches have yielded effective distributed solutions for such missions, showing the ability to manage heterogeneous, dynamic and robust robot teams. Two major challenges remain however poorly tackled: the management of inter-r...

In this paper a case study of cooperation of a strongly heterogeneous autonomous robot team, composed of a highly articulated humanoid robot and a wheeled robot with largely complementing and some redundant abilities is presented. By combining strongly heterogeneous robots the diversity of achievable tasks increases as the variety of sensing and motion abilities of the robot system is extended ...

This paper describes a software architecture that al lows for traded control of a robot manipulator per forming a pick and place task The software architec ture combines multi agent planning conditional se quencing robot control and user interfaces to allow for a user to intervene at any level of robot task ex ecution At the heart of the software architecture is the T architecture which allows ...

This paper presents an approach for multi-robot coordination based both on coordinated navigation and task allocation method. An ad hoc agent based architecture is defined in order to implement the robot control system in both simulation and real applications. The coordination of the multi-robot system is based on agent interaction and negotiation, and a communication infrastructure based on op...

Current technology trends in robotics are leading us to the development of multi-robot systems, that are capable of performing complex and multi-level tasks. Despite more than two decades of theoretical and experimental work on multi-robot systems, important aspects of coordination among robots have been untreated. To refer this issue, we focus on the problem of allocating tasks to a set of rob...

In this paper, we present provably-good distributed task allocation (assignment) algorithms for a heterogeneous multi-robot system where the tasks form disjoint groups and there are constraints on the number of tasks a robot can do (both within the overall mission and within each task group). Our problem is motivated by applications where multiple robots with heterogeneous capabilities have to ...

Several researchers, present authors included, envision personal mobile robot agents that can assist humans in their daily tasks. Despite many advances in robotics, such mobile robot agents still face many limitations in their perception, cognition, and action capabilities. In this work, we propose a symbiotic interaction between robot agents and humans to overcome the robot limitations while a...

Energy aware operation is one of the visionary goals in the area of robotics because operability of robots is greatly dependent upon their residual energy. Practically, the tasks allocated to robots carry different priority and often an upper limit of timestamp is imposed within which the task needs to be completed. If a robot is unable to complete one particular task given to it the task is re...

We are currently engaged in advancing research in human-robot cooperation with the goal of realizing service robots in homes and offices. In order to assist humans, robots must correctly identify the tasks that humans intend to perform, and then devise strategies to perform those tasks. To accomplish this, we first define the framework of a task model for assisting a human's work. The robot the...

Mobile robots are increasingly being used for tasks like remote surveillance, sensing and maintenance. Some of these tasks are critical and require intelligent decision making for successful completion. It is not always possible to rely exclusively on robot level intelligence to make high impact decisions and hence human supervision is needed during task execution. To facilitate human-in-the-lo...