Abstract:We present the design and implementation of a decentralised, heterogeneous multi-robot system for performing intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) in an unknown environment. The team consists of functionally specialised robots that gather information and others that perform a mission-specific task, and is coordinated to achieve simultaneous exploration and exploitation in the unknown environment. We present a practical implementation of such a system, including decentralised inter-robot localisation, mapping, data fusion and coordination. The system is demonstrated in an efficient distributed simulation. We also describe an UAS platform for hardware experiments, and the ongoing progress.
Abstract:Heterogeneous multi-robot systems are advantageous for operations in unknown environments because functionally specialised robots can gather environmental information, while others perform tasks. We define this decomposition as the scout-task robot architecture and show how it avoids the need to explicitly balance exploration and exploitation~by permitting the system to do both simultaneously. The challenge is to guide exploration in a way that improves overall performance for time-limited tasks. We derive a novel upper confidence bound for simultaneous exploration and exploitation based on mutual information and present a general solution for scout-task coordination using decentralised Monte Carlo tree search. We evaluate the performance of our algorithms in a multi-drone surveillance scenario in which scout robots are equipped with low-resolution, long-range sensors and task robots capture detailed information using short-range sensors. The results address a new class of coordination problem for heterogeneous teams that has many practical applications.