Needs-driven Heterogeneous Multi-Robot Cooperation in Rescue Missions

2020 IEEE International Symposium on Safety, Security, and Rescue Robotics (SSRR)

November 4-6, Abu Dhabi, UAE

Paper Link: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9292570

Abstract

This paper focuses on the teaming aspects and the role of heterogeneity in a multi-robot system applied to robot-aided urban search and rescue (USAR) missions.

We propose a needs-driven multi-robot cooperation mechanism represented through a Behavior Tree structure and evaluate the system's performance in terms of the group utility and energy cost to achieve the rescue mission in a limited time.

From the theoretical analysis, we prove that the needs-driven cooperation in a heterogeneous robot system enables higher group utility than a homogeneous robot system. We also perform simulation experiments to verify the proposed needs-driven collaboration and show that the heterogeneous multi-robot cooperation can achieve better performance and increase system robustness by reducing uncertainty in task execution. Finally, we discuss the application to human-robot teaming.