Multi-Robot Co-ordination For Box-Pushing using Embedded Controller?

Multi-Robot coordination for task allocation has been widely studied topic in the literature. A robot team can accomplish a given task more quickly than a single robot can by dividing the task into sub-tasks and executing them concurrently in application domains where the tasks can be decomposed. It leads to effective coverage of a large area. The principle of territoriality in homogeneous agent groups is a physical division of space and all associated recourses in order to minimize interference and maximize synergy. Each robot is assigned a working area and robots operate only in work space allocated to them in order to reduce interference between them. Dynamic task allocation allows robots to change their behavior in response to environmental changes in order to improve overall task performance. From the studies related on division of labor mechanism in the insect society it can be found that an individual engages in task performance if environment exceed their intrinsic thresholds. The advantage of centralized approach is that they can produce globally optimal plans. In our work, we exploit some of the features of territoriality, dynamic task allocation, division of labor in insect societies and centralized systems. We propose action selection without explicit communication for multi-robot box-pushing which changes a suitable behaviour set depending on a situation for adaptation to a dynamic environment. A central controller identifies the situation and issues the appropriate control signals to adapt the suitable behaviour set to it. As a result, we find out our approach is promising for designing adaptive multi-robot box-pushing. We demonstrate these concepts using three line following mobile robots. The task is to push a given box from source location to destination location. The number of robots active at a given time depends upon the weight of the box. The boxes to be moved are of different weight. The ratio of robots working at a given time change dynamically as per the changes in environment.