Cooperation protocols in multi-agent robotic systems

Multi-agent robotic systems are useful in many practical applications. For some tasks, such as holding a conference, cooperation among agents are necessary. For other tasks, such as cleaning a room, multiple agents can work in parallel for better performance. This paper provides help-based (HCP) and coordination-based (CCP) protocols for controlling agents to accomplish multi-agent tasks. The HCP utilizes efficient negotiation to coordinate agents into groups. The CCP improves overall performance by exchanging local knowledge among agents and making decisions in parallel. A reactive and modularized agent architecture was employed to implement the protocols. Since each protocol is embedded into the architecture, it is efficient and effective. In addition, the protocols are deadlock-free. The protocols were utilized to solve the Object-Sorting Task, which abstracts two characteristics of tasks: parallelism and cooperation. The experimental results showed that 1) both HCP and CCP are stable under different workload; 2) the protocols can effectively utilize the agent-power to achieve super-linear improvement; 3) The CCP is better than the HCP in both performance and speedup.