Mary Koes

AAMAS Conference 2006 Conference Paper

A Constraint Optimization Framework for Fractured Robot Teams

• Mary Koes
• Katia Sycara
• Illah Nourbakhsh

ICRA Conference 2006 Conference Paper

Constraint Optimization Coordination Architecture for Search and Rescue Robotics

• Mary Koes
• Illah R. Nourbakhsh
• Katia P. Sycara

The dangerous and time sensitive nature of a disaster area makes it an ideal application for robotic exploration. Our long term goal is to enable humans, software agents, and autonomous robots to work together to save lives. Existing work in coordination for search and rescue does not address the variety of constraints that apply to the problem. This paper provides an expressive language for specifying system constraints. We also describe a coordination architecture capable of quickly finding an optimal or near optimal solution to the combined problems of task allocation, scheduling, and path planning subject to system constraints. We address a perceived lack of benchmarks for this research area by establishing a repository open to the research community which includes a set of benchmarks we designed to illustrate some of the complexities of the problem space. Finally, we evaluate various algorithms on these benchmarks

AAAI Conference 2005 Conference Paper

Heterogeneous Multirobot Coordination with Spatial and Temporal Constraints

• Mary Koes

Existing approaches to multirobot coordination separate scheduling and task allocation, but finding the optimal schedule with joint tasks and spatial constraints requires robots to simultaneously solve the scheduling, task allocation, and path planning problems. We present a formal description of the multirobot joint task allocation problem with heterogeneous capabilities and spatial constraints and an instantiation of the problem for the search and rescue domain. We introduce a novel declarative framework for modeling the problem as a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) problem and present a centralized anytime algorithm with error bounds. We demonstrate that our algorithm can outperform standard MILP solving techniques, greedy heuristics, and a market based approach which separates scheduling and task allocation.

ICRA Conference 2004 Conference Paper

Communication Efficiency in Multi-agent Systems

• Mary Koes
• Illah R. Nourbakhsh
• Katia P. Sycara

Despite the growing number of multi-agent software systems, relatively few physical systems have adopted multi-agent systems technology. Agents that interact with a dynamic physical environment have requirements not shared by virtual agents, including the need to transfer information about the world and their interaction with it. The agent communication languages proven successful in software based multi-agent systems incur overheads that make them impractical or infeasible for the transfer of low-level data. Instead, real world systems typically employ application specific protocols to transfer video, audio, sensory, or telemetry data. These protocols lack the transparency and portability of formal agent communication languages and consequently are limited in their scalability. We propose augmenting the capabilities of current multi-agent systems to provide for the efficient transfer of low-level information, by allowing backchannels of communication between agents with flexible protocols in a carefully principled way. We show that this extension can yield significant performance increases in communication efficiency and discuss the benefits of incorporating backchannels into a search a rescue robot system.