Multi-Robot Task Allocation Using Global Games with Negative Feedback: The Colony Maintenance Problem
Document Type
Conference Paper
Publication Date
2025
DOI
10.1609/aaai.v39i13.33485
Publication Title
Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Volume
39
Issue
13
Pages
13597-13604
Conference Name
AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, February 25-March 4, 2025, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Abstract
In this article we address the multi-robot task allocation problem, where robots must cooperatively assign themselves to accomplish a set of tasks in their environment. We consider the colony maintenance problem as an example, where a team of robots are tasked with continuously maintaining the energy supply of a central colony. We model this as a global game, where each robot measures the energy level of the colony, and the current number of assigned robots, to determine whether or not to forage for energy sources. The key to our approach is introducing a negative feedback term into the robots' utility, which also eliminates the trivial solution where foraging or not foraging are strictly dominant strategies. We compare our approach qualitatively to existing global games, where a positive positive feedback term admits threshold-based decision making, and encourages many robots to forage simultaneously. We show how positive feedback can lead to a cascading failure in the presence of a human who recruits robots, and we demonstrate the resilience of our approach in simulation.
Rights
© 2024 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. All rights reserved.
"In the returned rights section of the AAAI copyright form, authors are specifically granted back the right to use their own papers for noncommercial uses, such as inclusion in their dissertations or the right to deposit their own papers in their institutional repositories, provided there is proper attribution."
Original Publication Citation
Beaver, L. E. (2025). Multi-robot task allocation using global games with negative feedback: The colony maintenance problem. Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 39(13), 13597-13604. https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v39i13.33485
ORCID
0000-0002-9770-2740 (Beaver)
Repository Citation
Beaver, Logan E., "Multi-Robot Task Allocation Using Global Games with Negative Feedback: The Colony Maintenance Problem" (2025). Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering Faculty Publications. 174.
https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/mae_fac_pubs/174