Balancing Team Membership and Independent Activity for Robots in Dangerous Domains

Seth Fiawoo, John Anderson

Abstract: Dangerous domains are a challenge for teams of heterogeneous robots, since robot losses may involve the loss of particular skills that might be rare in the domain. Our work considers situations where agents may at times provide more useful work globally by not joining a team, or situations where it might be discovered that types of work might be associated with a given locality. Our framework gives agents the ability to refuse to join teams and work for times on their own, by considering current satisfaction in the use of their skills, the likely rarity of their skills, and the distribution of places those skills are used in the environment. We examine this work in a simulated Urban Search and Rescue domain. In this paper, we describe extensions that we have made to existing research that has resulted in a framework that allows teams to rebalance and recruit from the environment.