A Generic Framework for Distributed Multirobot Cooperation

DEMiR-CF is a generic framework designed for a multirobot team to efficiently allocate tasks among themselves and achieve an overall mission. In the design of DEMiR-CF, the following issues were particularly investigated as the design criteria: efficient and realistic representation of missions, efficient allocation of tasks to cooperatively achieve a global goal, maintenance of the system coherence and consistency by the team members, detection of the contingencies and recover from various failures that may arise during runtime, efficient reallocation of tasks (if necessary) and reorganization of team members (if necessary). DEMiR-CF is designed to address different types of missions from the simplest to more complex ones, including missions with interrelated tasks and multi-resource (robot) requirements. Efficiency of the framework is validated through experiments in three different types of domains.