Planning-Aware Communication for Decentralised Multi-Robot Coordination
Graeme Best, Michael Forrai, Ramgopal R. Mettu, Robert Fitch
Abstract
We present an algorithm for selecting when to communicate during online planning phases of coordinated multi-robot missions. The key idea is that a robot decides to request communication from another robot by reasoning over the predicted information value of communication messages over a sliding time-horizon, where communication messages are probability distributions over action sequences. We formulate this problem in the context of the recently proposed decentralised Monte Carlo tree search (Dec-MCTS) algorithm for online, decentralised multi-robot coordination. We propose a particle filter for predicting the information value, and a polynomial-time belief-space planning algorithm for finding the optimal communication schedules in an online and decentralised manner. We evaluate the benefit of informative communication planning for a multi-robot information gathering scenario with 8 simulated robots. Our results show reductions in channel utilisation of up to four-fifths with surprisingly little impact on coordination performance.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{icra2018_planningawarecom,
title = {Planning-Aware Communication for Decentralised Multi-Robot Coordination},
author = {Graeme Best and Michael Forrai and Ramgopal R. Mettu and Robert Fitch},
booktitle = {ICRA 2018},
year = {2018}
}