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Decentralized decision making in adaptive multi-robot teams

  • Kurt Geihs

    Kurt Geihs is a full professor in the EECS Department and a director of the interdisciplinary Research Centre for Information System Design (ITeG) at the University of Kassel (Germany). His research and teaching interests include distributed systems, operating systems, and software technology. Current research projects focus on self-adaptive software, teamwork of collaborative multi-robot systems, and management of service-oriented computing systems. He has published more than 200 refereed articles and is author / co-author / editor of several books. Before joining the University of Kassel he was professor at TU Berlin and University of Frankfurt, and researcher at the IBM European Networking Center in Heidelberg. From 2007-2015 he was a member of the Computer Science panel at the European Research Council (ERC). He has been a guest scientist at research institutes in several European countries, South Africa and the USA. He holds a PhD from RWTH Aachen, a M. Sc. from UC Los Angeles (USA), and a Diplom Degree from TU Darmstadt, all in Computer Science.

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    and Andreas Witsch

    Andreas Witsch is a technical project manager at Micromata GmbH, Kassel (Germany) where he supervises application development in the field of logistics. Before that he was a PhD student at the Distributed Systems Group at the University of Kassel (Germany) and a team leader of the Carpe Noctem robotic soccer team. In 2015, he was elected to the RoboCup Executive Board. From 2010 to 2012, he worked in the VENUS research cluster at the interdisciplinary Research Centre for Information System Design (ITeG). His research focuses on machine learning, behaviour modelling, and coordination of teams of autonomous robots. He holds a PhD and a MSc degree in Computer Science from the University of Kassel.

Abstract

We present our decision support middleware PROViDE that facilitates decentralized decision making in multi-robot teams operating in highly dynamic environments with potentially unreliable communication channels and noisy sensors. Achieving an adaptive team behavior in such an environment is a challenge because the specific conditions require a fully decentralized decision process. The design of PROViDE borrows inspiration from human decision making processes. PROViDE supports replication of proposals, conflict resolution, and final team-decision making. For each of these steps a choice of methods is offered to the developer to provide flexibility for different application requirements and characteristics of execution environments. PROViDE is integrated into a comprehensive modeling framework for multi-robot systems. The main contributions of this paper are twofold: For the development of adaptive multi-robot teams we discuss requirements for a middleware that supports decentralized decision making in dynamic and adverse environments, and we demonstrate the effective and coherent integration of a set of domain-dependent decision support protocols into a middleware framework.

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About the authors

Kurt Geihs

Kurt Geihs is a full professor in the EECS Department and a director of the interdisciplinary Research Centre for Information System Design (ITeG) at the University of Kassel (Germany). His research and teaching interests include distributed systems, operating systems, and software technology. Current research projects focus on self-adaptive software, teamwork of collaborative multi-robot systems, and management of service-oriented computing systems. He has published more than 200 refereed articles and is author / co-author / editor of several books. Before joining the University of Kassel he was professor at TU Berlin and University of Frankfurt, and researcher at the IBM European Networking Center in Heidelberg. From 2007-2015 he was a member of the Computer Science panel at the European Research Council (ERC). He has been a guest scientist at research institutes in several European countries, South Africa and the USA. He holds a PhD from RWTH Aachen, a M. Sc. from UC Los Angeles (USA), and a Diplom Degree from TU Darmstadt, all in Computer Science.

Andreas Witsch

Andreas Witsch is a technical project manager at Micromata GmbH, Kassel (Germany) where he supervises application development in the field of logistics. Before that he was a PhD student at the Distributed Systems Group at the University of Kassel (Germany) and a team leader of the Carpe Noctem robotic soccer team. In 2015, he was elected to the RoboCup Executive Board. From 2010 to 2012, he worked in the VENUS research cluster at the interdisciplinary Research Centre for Information System Design (ITeG). His research focuses on machine learning, behaviour modelling, and coordination of teams of autonomous robots. He holds a PhD and a MSc degree in Computer Science from the University of Kassel.

Acknowledgment

The contributions of all members of the soccer robotics team Carpe Noctem Cassel (CNC) at the University of Kassel are gratefully acknowledged.

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Received: 2017-09-25
Revised: 2018-02-12
Accepted: 2018-02-19
Published Online: 2018-07-28
Published in Print: 2018-08-28

© 2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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