Distributed task allocation for multi-robot systems in military domain

Min-Hyuk Kim, Purdue University

Abstract

Multi-Robot Systems (MRS) are now becoming increasingly prevalent to many applications. Among the various applications, there has been substantial interest of using MRS for military purposes because of the benefits such as conservation of personnel resources and fast and efficient mission accomplishment. In order to gain these benefits, the problem that should be essentially addressed is task allocation of which objective is to assign individual tasks among robots so that the performance of military operation will be greatly enhanced. Although there has been a great deal of solutions, from general architectures to domain-specific solutions, proposed for task allocation problems in MRS, most of the solutions do not fully address constraints and requirements that are unique to military MRS, and hence there are some difficulties to directly apply these existing solutions to military applications. Moreover, there have been no thorough research works that study important task allocation issues across a variety of military applications. Motivated by this notion, this research focuses on multi-robot task allocation problems in military applications and proposes robust and efficient task allocation schemes. We are particularly interested in distributed task allocation mechanisms for a heterogeneous robot team that performs complex tasks in dynamic and uncertain environments. Throughout this thesis, we investigate some important features of military MRS, constraints and requirements of multi-robot task allocation in military applications, and discuss existing research works pertinent to our problem. Then, we present robust and efficient distributed multi-robot task allocation schemes for different military applications distinguished by non-combat and combat scenarios.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Lee, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Industrial engineering|Robotics

COinS