13 accepted papers
This paper studies coordinated behaviors which arise when a team of robots must traverse hazardous environments in the presence of an adversary. We formulate the scenario as a novel non-cooperative stochastic game in which the "blue" team of robots moves in an environment modeled by a time-varying g
In multi-robot systems, achieving coordinated missions remains a significant challenge due to the coupled nature of coordination behaviors and the lack of global information for individual robots. To mitigate these challenges, this paper introduces a novel approach, Bi-level Coordination Learning (B…
This paper aims to solve the coordination of a team of robots traversing a route in the presence of adversaries with random positions. Our goal is to minimize the overall cost of the team, which is determined by (i) the accumulated risk when robots stay in adversary-impacted zones and (ii) the missi…
This paper studies Reinforcement Learning (RL) techniques to enable team coordination behaviors in graph environments with support actions among teammates to reduce the costs of traversing certain risky edges in a centralized manner. While classical approaches can solve this non-standard multi-agent…
Team Coordination on Graphs with Risky Edges (TCGRE) is a recently emerged problem, in which a robot team collectively reduces graph traversal cost through support from one robot to another when the latter traverses a risky edge. Resembling the traditional Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) problem, bo…
This paper studies a team coordination problem in a graph environment. Specifically, we incorporate “support” action which an agent can take to reduce the cost for its teammate to traverse some high cost edges. Due to this added feature, the graph traversal is no longer a standard multi-agent path p…
Visiting and observing specified locations is a fundamental task for various applications including environmental monitoring and military operations. The Orienteering Problem (OP) is a variant of routing problems in which the goal is to maximize the objective function by visiting the most rewarding
We formulate a scenario in which an autonomous defender is tasked with intercepting an intruder that tries to reach a circular target region. This is a variant of the target defense problem proposed by Isaacs as a pursuit-evasion game. Unlike the original target guarding problem and its various exte…
Multi-Robot Systems have been recently employed in different applications and have advantages over single-robot systems, such as increased robustness and task performance efficiency. We consider such assemblies specifically in the scenario of perimeter defense, where the task is to defend a circular…
This letter studies a variant of the multi-player reach-avoid game played between intruders and defenders with applications to perimeter defense. The intruder team tries to score by sending as many intruders as possible to the target area, while the defender team tries to minimize this score by inte
We present an algorithm for the concurrent assignment and planning of collision-free trajectories (DC-CAPT) for robots whose kinematics can be modeled as Dubins cars, i.e., robots constrained in terms of their initial orientation and their minimum turning radius. Coupling the assignment and trajecto…
We study strategies to deploy defenders/sensors to detect intruders that approach a targeted region. This scenario is formulated as a barrier coverage, which aims to minimize the number of unseen paths. The problem becomes challenging when the number of defenders is insufficient for a full coverage,…
Effective communication is required for teams of robots to solve sophisticated collaborative tasks. In practice it is typical for both the encoding and semantics of communication to be manually defined by an expert; this is true regardless of whether the behaviors themselves are bespoke, optimizatio…