Abstract
The increase in robotic capabilities and the number of such systems being used has resulted in opportunities for robots to work alongside humans in an increasing number of domains. The current robot control paradigm of one or multiple humans controlling a single robot is not scalable to domains that require large numbers of robots and is infeasible in communications constrained environments. Robots must autonomously plan how to accomplish missions composed of many tasks in complex and dynamic domains; however, mission planning with a large number of robots for such complex missions and domains is intractable. Coalition formation can manage planning problem complexity by allocating the best possible team of robots for each task. A limitation is that simply allocating the best possible team does not guarantee an executable plan can be formulated. However, coupling coalition formation with planning creates novel, domain-independent tools resulting in the best possible teams executing the best possible plans for robots acting in complex domains.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Allouche, M. K., & Boukhtouta, A. (2010). Multi-agent coordination by temporal plan fusion: Application to combat search and rescue. Information Fusion, 11(3), 220–232.
Barrientos, A., Colorado, J., Cerro, Jd, Martinez, A., Rossi, C., Sanz, D., et al. (2011). Aerial remote sensing in agriculture: A practical approach to area coverage and path planning for fleets of mini aerial robots. Journal of Field Robotics, 28(5), 667–689.
Bibaï, J., Savéant, P., Schoenauer, M., & Vidal, V. (2010). On the benefit of sub-optimality within the divide-and-evolve scheme. In P. Cowling & P. Merz (Eds.), Evolutionary computation in combinatorial optimization (Vol. 6022, pp. 23–34)., Lecture notes in computer science Berlin: Springer.
Brafman, R. I., & Domshlak, C. (2008). From one to many: Planning for loosely coupled multi-agent systems. In Proceedings of the 18th international conference on autonomous planning and scheduling (pp. 28–35).
Bryce, D., Gao, S., Musliner, D., & Goldman, R. (2015). SMT-based nonlinear PDDL+ planning. In Proceedings of the 29th conference on artificial intelligence (pp. 3247–3253).
Chaimowicz, L., Cowley, A., Sabella, V., & Taylor, C. (2003). ROCI: A distributed framework for multi-robot perception and control. In Proceedings of the 2003 IEEE/RSJ international conference on intelligent robots and systems (Vol. 1, pp. 266–271).
Chen, Y., Wah, B. W., & Hsu, C. W. (2006). Temporal planning using subgoal partitioning and resolution in SGPlan. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 26(1), 323–369.
Coles, A., Coles, A., Fox, M., & Long, D. (2012). COLIN: Planning with continuous linear numeric change. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 44(1), 1–96.
Cox, J. S., & Durfee, E. H. (2005). An efficient algorithm for multiagent plan coordination. In Proceedings of the 4th international joint conference on autonomous agents and multiagent systems (pp. 828–835).
Dias, M., Ghanem, B., & Stentz, A. (2005). Improving cost estimation in market-based coordination of a distributed sensing task. In Proceedings of the 2005 IEEE/RSJ international conference on intelligent robots and systems (pp. 3972–3977).
Dimopoulos, Y., Hashmi, M. A., & Moraitis, P. (2012). SATPLAN: Multi-agent planning as satisfiability. Knowledge-Based Systems, 29, 54–62.
Do, M., & Kambhampati, S. (2001). Sapa: A domain-independent heuristic metric temporal planner. In Proceedings of the 6th European conference on planning (pp. 57–68).
Engesse,r T., Bolander, T., Mattmüller, R., & Nebel, B. (2015). Cooperative epistemic multi-agent planning with implicit coordination. In Proceedings of the 3rd workshop on distributed and multi-agent planning (pp. 68 – 76).
Ephrati, E., & Rosenschein, J. S. (1993). Multi-agent planning as the process of merging distributed sub-plans. In Proceedings of the 12th international workshop on distributed artificial intelligence (pp. 115–129).
Ephrati, E., & Rosenschein, J. S. (1994). Divide and conquer in multi-agent planning. In Proceedings of the 12th national conference on artificial intelligence (Vol. 1, pp. 375–380).
Erol, K., Nau, D. S., & Subrahmanian, V. S. (1992). On the complexity of domain-independent planning. In Proceedings of the 10th national conference on artificial intelligence (pp. 381–386).
Eyerich, P., Keller, T., Aldinger, J., & Dornhege, C. (2014). Preferring preferred operators in temporal fast downward. In International planning competition (pp. 121–126).
Fikes, R. E., & Nilsson, N. J. (1971). STRIPS: A new approach to the application of theorem proving to problem solving. Artificial Intelligence, 2(34), 189–208.
Fox, M., & Long, D. (2003). PDDL 2.1: An extension to PDDL for expressing temporal planning domains. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 20(1), 61–124.
Gerkey, B. P., & Matarić, M. J. (2004). A formal analysis and taxonomy of task allocation in multi-robot systems. International Journal of Robotics Research, 23(9), 939–954.
Hoffmann, J. (2003). The metric-ff planning system: Translating ”ignoring delete lists” to numeric state variables. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 20(1), 291–341.
Howey, R., Long, D., & Fox, M. (2004). VAL: Automatic plan validation, continuous effects and mixed initiative planning using PDDL. In IEEE international conference on tools with artificial intelligence (pp. 294–301).
Hsu, C. W., Wah, B. W., Huang, R., & Chen, Y. (2007). Constraint partitioning for solving planning problems with trajectory constraints and goal preferences. In Proceedings of the 20th international joint conference on artifical intelligence (pp. 1924–1929).
Kim, M. H., Baik, H., & Lee, S. (2014). Response threshold model based uav search planning and task allocation. Journal of Intelligent and Robotic Systems, 75(3–4), 625–640.
Koes, M., Nourbakhsh, I., & Sycara, K. (2005). Heterogeneous multirobot coordination with spatial and temporal constraints. In Proceedings of the 20th national conference on artificial intelligence (Vol. 3, pp. 1292–1297).
Laborie, P., & Ghallab, M. (1995). IxTeT: An integrated approach for plan generation and scheduling. In Proceedings of the 1995 INRIA/IEEE symposium on emerging technologies and factory automation (Vol. 1, pp. 485–495).
Liemhetcharat, S., & Veloso, M. (2014). Weighted synergy graphs for effective team formation with heterogeneous ad hoc agents. Artificial Intelligence, 208, 41–65.
Long, D., & Fox, M. (2003). The 3rd international planning competition: Results and analysis. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 20(1), 1–59.
Moon, S., Oh, E., & Shim, D. (2013). An integral framework of task assignment and path planning for multiple unmanned aerial vehicles in dynamic environments. Journal of Intelligent and Robotic Systems, 70, 303–313.
Muise, C., Belle, V., Felli, P., McIlraith, S., Miller, T., Pearce, A. R., & Sonenberg, L. (2015). Planning over multi-agent epistemic states: A classical planning approach. In Proceedings of the 29th AAAI conference on artificial intelligence (pp. 3327–3334).
Penberthy, J. S., & Weld, D. S. (1994). Temporal planning with continuous change. In Proceedings of the 1994 AAAI conference on artificial intelligence (pp. 1010–1015).
Ponda, S., Johnson, L., & How, J. (2012). Distributed chance-constrained task allocation for autonomous multi-agent teams. In American control conference (pp. 4528–4533).
Rahwan, T., Ramchurn, S. D., Jennings, N. R., & Giovannucci, A. (2009). An anytime algorithm for optimal coalition structure generation. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 34, 521–567.
Ramchurn, S. D., Polukarov, M., Farinelli, A., Truong, C., & Jennings, N. R.(2010). Coalition formation with spatial and temporal constraints. In Proceedings of the 9th international conference on autonomous agents and multiagent systems (Vol. 3, pp. 1181–1188).
Rankooh, M. F., & Ghassem-Sani, G. (2015). ITSAT: An efficient sat-based temporal planner. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 53, 541–632.
Ren, Z., Feng, Z., & Wang, X. (2008). An efficient ant colony optimization approach to agent coalition formation problem. In Proceedings of the 7th world congress on intelligent control and automation (pp. 7879–7882).
Sandholm, T., Larson, K., Andersson, M., Shehory, O., & Tohmé, F. (1999). Coalition structure generation with worst case guarantees. Artificial Intelligence, 111(1–2), 209–238.
Sen, S. D. (2015). An intelligent and unified framework for multiple robot and human coalition formation. Ph.D. thesis, Vanderbilt University.
Sen, S. D., & Adams, J. A. (2014). An influence diagram based multi-criteria decision making framework for multirobot coalition formation. Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, 29, 1061–1090.
Service, T. C., & Adams, J. A. (2011). Coalition formation for task allocation: Theory and algorithms. Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, 22(2), 225–248.
Service, T. C., Sen, S. D., & Adams, J. A. (2014). A simultaneous descending auction for task allocation. In Proceedings of the 2014 IEEE international conference on systems, man and cybernetics, IEEE (pp. 379–384).
Shehory, O., & Kraus, S. (1998). Methods for task allocation via agent coalition formation. Artificial Intelligence, 101, 165–200.
Shiroma, P. M., & Campos, M. F. M. (2009). Comutar: A framework for multi-robot coordination and task allocation. In 2009 IEEE/RSJ international conference on intelligent robots and systems (pp. 4817–4824).
Sujit, P., Manathara, J., Ghose, D., & de Sousa, J. (2014). Decentralized multi-uav coalition formation with limited communication ranges. In K. P. Valavanis & G. J. Vachtsevanos (Eds.), Handbook of unmanned aerial vehicles (pp. 2021–2048). Dordrecht: Springer.
Tang, F., & Parker, L. E. (2005). ASyMTRe: Automated synthesis of multi-robot task solutions through software reconfiguration. In Proceedings of IEEE international conference on robotics and automation (pp. 1513–1520).
Torreño, A., Onaindía, E., & Sapena, O. (2012). An approach to multi-agent planning with incomplete information. European Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 242, 762–767.
Turpin, M., Michael, N., & Kumar, V. (2013). Trajectory planning and assignment in multirobot systems. In E. Frazzoli, T. Lozano-Perez, N. Roy, & D. Rus (Eds.), Algorithmic foundations of robotics X, Springer tracts in advanced robotics (Vol. 86, pp. 175–190). Berlin: Springer.
Turpin, M., Michael, N., & Kumar, V. (2014). CAPT: Concurrent assignment and planning of trajectories for multiple robots. The International Journal of Robotics Research, 33(1), 98–112.
Vidal, V. (2004). The yahsp planning system: Forward heuristic search with lookahead plans analysis. In 4th international planning competition, Citeseer (pp. 56–58).
Vig, L., & Adams, J. A. (2006a). Market-based multi-robot coalition formation. In Proceedings of the 8th international symposium on distributed autonomous robotic systems (pp. 227–236).
Vig, L., & Adams, J. A. (2006b). Multi-robot coalition formation. IEEE Transactions on Robotics, 22(4), 637–649.
de Weerdt, M., Bos, A., Tonino, H., & Witteveen, C. (2003). A resource logic for multi-agent plan merging. Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence, 37(1–2), 93–130.
Wicke, D., Freelan, D., & Luke, S. (2015). Bounty hunters and multiagent task allocation. In Proceedings of the 2015 international conference on autonomous agents and multiagent systems (pp. 387–394).
Zhu, D., Huang, H., & Yang, S. (2013). Dynamic task assignment and path planning of multi-auv system based on an improved self-organizing map and velocity synthesis method in three-dimensional underwater workspace. IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics, 43(2), 504–514.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Dukeman, A., Adams, J.A. Hybrid mission planning with coalition formation. Auton Agent Multi-Agent Syst 31, 1424–1466 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10458-017-9367-7
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10458-017-9367-7