Auction aggregation protocols for wireless robot-robot coordination

Abstract

Robots coordinate among themselves to select one of them to respond to an event reported to one of robots. The goal is to minimize the communication cost of selecting best robot, response time, and cost of performing the task. Existing solutions are either centralized, neglecting communication cost, assuming complete graph, or based on flooding with individual responses to robot decision maker (simple auction protocol), ignoring communication cost and response time bound. This article proposes auction aggregation protocols for task assignment in multi-hop wireless robot networks. Robot collector leads an auction and initiates response tree construction by transmitting search message. Each robot, after receiving the message, makes decision on whether to retransmit search message, based on the estimated response cost of its robots up to k-hops away. Robots wait to receive the bids from its children in the search tree, aggregates responses by selecting the best bid, and forward it back toward the robot collector (auctioning robot). When distance is used as sole cost metrics, traversal aggregation algorithm (RFT - routing toward the event with traversal of face containing the event) can be applied and is an optimal solution. Advantage of our auction aggregation over simple auction protocol is shown by simulation results. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.