Summary
The market based approach is widely used to solve the problem of multirobot coordination. In this approach, communication and computation costs are key issues, but have not been carefully addressed by the different architectures in the literature. In this paper, we present a method to reduce these costs, by adding the capability to learn whether a task is worth offering up for auction and also whether it is worth bidding for the task, based on previous experience about successful and unsuccessful bids. We show that the method significantly decreases communication and computation costs, while maintaining good overall performance of the team.
Keywords
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
V. Cicirello and S. Smith. Amplification of Search Performance through Randomization of Heuristics. In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Principles of Constraint Programming (CP 02), 2002.
M. B. Dias and A. Stentz. A Free Market Architecture for Distributed Control of a Multirobot System. In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Intelligent Autonomous Systems, pages 115–122, 2000.
A. Gage and R. Murphy. Affective Recruitment of Distributed Heterogeneous Agents. In Proc. of 19th National Conference on AI, pages 14–19, 2004.
B. Gerkey and M. Matarić. Sold! Auction methods for multi-robot control. IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation, 18(5):758–768, 2002.
B. Gerkey and M. Matarić. A formal analysis and taxonomy of task allocation in multi-robot systems. Int. J. of Robotics Research, 23(9):939–954, 2004.
D. Goldberg, V. Cicirello, M. B. Dias, R. Simmons, S. Smith, and A. Stentz. Market-Based Multi-Robot Planning in a Distributed Layered Architecture. In Multi-Robot Systems: From Swarms to Intelligent Automata: Proceedings from the 2003 International Workshop on Multi-Robot Systems, volume 2, pages 27–38. Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003.
M. Golfarelli, D. Maio, and S. Rizzi. A Task-Swap Negotiation Protocol Based on the Contract Net Paradigm. Tech. Report, 005-97, CSITE (Research Centre for Informatics and Telecommunication Systems), University of Bologna, 1997.
K. Larson and T. Sandholm. Costly Valuation Computation in Auctions. In Proc. of Theoretical Aspects of Reasoning about Knowledge, pages 169–182, 2001.
P. Milgrom. Auctions and bidding: A primer. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 3(3):3–22, 1989.
L. Parker. Alliance: An architecture for fault-tolerant multi-robot cooperation. IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation, 14(2):220–240, 1998.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2006 Springer-Verlag Tokyo
About this paper
Cite this paper
Busquets, D., Simmons, R. (2006). Learning when to Auction and when to Bid. In: Gini, M., Voyles, R. (eds) Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems 7. Springer, Tokyo. https://doi.org/10.1007/4-431-35881-1_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/4-431-35881-1_3
Publisher Name: Springer, Tokyo
Print ISBN: 978-4-431-35878-7
Online ISBN: 978-4-431-35881-7
eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)