CAREER: Decentralized and Online Planning for Emergent Cooperation in Multi-Robot Teams

移动机器人团队可以满足家庭服务、个人移动、仓库管理和农业监控的需求。这些应用需要机器人在复杂、动态和杂乱的环境中工作。此外，机器人需要与其他机器人和人类互动。了解机器人如何与其他机器人互动的细微差别可以使系统更安全、更健壮。最先进的研究通常将机器人团队定义为合作或非合作，团队内部具有固定的关系和互动。然而，这限制了机器人团队的能力。该学院早期职业发展（Career）项目设想机器人团队通过紧急合作适应他人。机器人可能会根据他们的任务、环境和其他人的决定改变他们的合作方式。创建这些机器人团队需要对它们如何做出决策有新的见解。本项目探索机器人团队的声誉、互惠和共存，从而实现紧急合作。为机器人配备这些技能可以创建更安全、更强大的移动服务机器人团队。本项目研究如何将底层合作和交互模型集成到异构移动机器人团队的设计中。这项研究中不可或缺的是新型几何控制策略，该策略结合了其他机器人的不确定性和未来预测。对(1)声誉、(2)互惠和(3)共存的研究致力于实现紧急合作的长期目标。利用新的几何工具进行环境分解允许机器人之间快速和分散的决策，并将其与博弈论和非线性控制相结合，允许机器人对未来的行动进行推理。该项目将开发具有可证明特性的新型分布式和分散控制算法，并在仿真和硬件实验中展示其性能。第一个目标是预测其他机器人的声誉。对声誉的估计使机器人能够根据其他人的预测能力划分环境，在没有直接沟通的情况下适应变化。第二个目标定义互惠性，它允许机器人基于历史交互预测和协商本地交互，并提高团队的整体效率。第三个目标是探索共存，它允许机器人在共享环境中预测与其他团队的冲突，并修改策略以减少冲突，同时仍然实现他们的目标。通过合作博弈论和李亚普诺夫稳定性理论对这些策略的绩效进行分析，可以证明量化机器人团队的绩效收益。最终，这使得一组机器人能够在混乱的环境中与一组未知的机器人进行合作。示例应用包括送货机器人和资源搜寻机器人。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Mobile robot teams can address needs for in-home service, personal mobility, warehouse management, and agricultural monitoring. These applications require robots to work in complex, dynamic, and cluttered environments. Further, robots need to interact with other robots and humans. Understanding nuances in how robots interact with other robots allows for safer and more robust systems. State-of-the-art research often defines teams of robots as cooperative or non-cooperative, with fixed relationships and interactions within the team. However, this limits the capabilities of the robot team. This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) project envisions robot teams that adapt to others with emergent cooperation. Robots may change their cooperation based on their task, surroundings, and the decisions of others. Creating these robot teams requires new insight into how they make decisions. This project explores reputation, reciprocity, and co-existence for a robot team, which enable emergent cooperation. Equipping robots with these skills creates safer and more robust teams of mobile service robots.This project investigates how to integrate underlying cooperation and interaction models into the design of a heterogeneous mobile robot team. Integral to this research are new types of geometric control policies that incorporate uncertainty and future predictions of other robots. Research on (1) reputation, (2) reciprocity, and (3) co-existence work towards the long-term goal of enabling emergent cooperation. Leveraging new geometric tools for environmental decompositions allows for fast and decentralized decision-making among robots, and combining this with game theory and nonlinear control allows the robots to reason about future actions. This project will develop new distributed and decentralized control algorithms with provable properties and demonstrate their performance in simulations and hardware experiments. The first objective focuses on predicting the reputation of other robots. Estimating reputation allows robots to partition an environment based on the predicted ability of others, adjusting to variations without direct communication. The second objective defines reciprocity, which allows robots to predict and negotiate local interactions based on historical interactions and improves the overall efficiency across teams. The third objective explores co-existence, which allows robots to predict conflict with other teams in shared environments and modify policies to reduce conflict while still fulfilling their goals. The performance of these policies will be analyzed through cooperative game theory and Lyapunov stability theory, allowing for provably quantifying the performance gains of robot teams. Ultimately, this enables a team of robots to cooperate with an unknown group of robots within a cluttered environment. Example applications include delivery robots and resource-foraging robots.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.