A layered architecture for coordination of mobile robots

This paper presents an architecture that enables multiple robots to explicitly coordinate actions at multiple levels of abstraction. In particular, we are developing an extension to the traditional three-layered robot architecture that enables robots to interact directly at each layer - at the behavioral level, the robots create distributed control loops; at the executive level, they synchronize task execution; at the planning level, they use market-based techniques to assign tasks, form teams, and allocate resources. We illustrate these ideas through applications in multi-robot assembly, multi-robot deployment, and multi-robot mapping.