Publication Details

Janelle Blankenburg, Santosh Balajee Banisetty, Seyed (Pourya) Hoseini, Luke Fraser, David Feil-Seifer, Monica Nicolescu, and Mircea Nicolescu. "A Distributed Control Architecture for Collaborative Multi-Robot Task Allocation." In International Conference on Humanoid Robots, Birmingham, UK, Nov 2017. doi: 10.1109/HUMANOIDS.2017.8246931 ( pdf )


  • Keywords:
  • SARG
  • collaborative robotics
  • task allocation
  • task architecture
  • humanoids

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of task allocation for multi-robot systems that perform tasks with complex, hierarchical representations which contain different types of ordering constraints and multiple paths of execution. We propose a distributed multi-robot control architecture that addresses the above challenges and makes the following contributions: i) it allows for on-line, dynamic allocation of robots to various steps of the task, ii) it ensures that the collaborative robot system will obey all of the task constraints and iii) it allows for opportunistic, flexible task execution given different environmental conditions. This architecture uses a distributed messaging system to allow the robots to communicate. Each robot uses its own state and team member states to keep track of the progress on a given task and identify which sub-tasks to perform next using an activation spreading mechanism. We demonstrate the proposed architecture on a team of two humanoid robots (a PR2 and a Baxter) performing hierarchical tasks.

Author Details

Name: Janelle Blankenburg
email: jjblankenburg@nevada.unr.edu
Website: jblankenburg.github.io
Status: Active

Name: Santosh Balajee Banisetty
email: santoshbanisetty@nevada.unr.edu
Website: http://www.santoshbanisetty.com/
Status: Active

Name: Seyed (Pourya) Hoseini
Status: Active

Name: Luke Fraser
email: Fraser@nevada.unr.edu
Phone: 775-273-8474
Status: Active

Name: David Feil-Seifer
email: dave@cse.unr.edu
Website: http://cse.unr.edu/~dave
Phone: (775) 784-6469
Status: Active

Name: Monica Nicolescu
Status: Active

Name: Mircea Nicolescu
Status: Inactive

BibTex Reference

@inproceedings{blankenburg2017a,
  title={A Distributed Control Architecture for Collaborative Multi-Robot Task Allocation},
  author={Janelle Blankenburg and Santosh Balajee Banisetty and Seyed (Pourya) Hoseini and Luke Fraser and David Feil-Seifer and Monica Nicolescu and Mircea Nicolescu},
  year={2017},
  month={November},
  address={Birmingham, UK},
  doi={10.1109/HUMANOIDS.2017.8246931},
  booktitle={International Conference on Humanoid Robots},
}

HTML Reference

<span class="authors">Janelle Blankenburg, Santosh Balajee Banisetty, Seyed (Pourya) Hoseini, Luke Fraser, David Feil-Seifer, Monica Nicolescu, and Mircea Nicolescu</span>. <span class="title">"A Distributed Control Architecture for Collaborative Multi-Robot Task Allocation." </span> In <span class="booktitle">International Conference on Humanoid Robots</span>, <span class="address">Birmingham, UK</span>, <span class="month">Nov</span> <span class="year">2017</span>. <span class="ending"></span> <span class="doi">doi: 10.1109/HUMANOIDS.2017.8246931</span>

Support

Designing Collaborator Robots for Highly-Dynamic Multi-Human, Multi-Robot Teams, Office of Naval Research (ONR) PI: Monica Nicolescu, co-PI: David Feil-Seifer, Amount: $656,511, April 1, 2016 - March 31, 2019

DURIP: Humanoid Platforms for Human-Robot Collaboration, Office of Naval Research (ONR) PI: Monica Nicolescu, co-PI: David Feil-Seifer, Mircea Nicolescu, Amount: $312,000, May 1, 2014 - June 30, 2015