Explorations-Strategien für Roboter-Teams

In this project we aim at laying the algorithmic foundations for a scenario where an exploration team of robots - we call it a smart team -  has to organize itself in order to fulfill tasks like exploring an unknown terrain  and  executing work in this terrain. This research is funded as a sub-project in SPP 1183 (Organic Computing).

The tasks of such a smart team are similar to the fundamental challenges of all social life forms: Explore, (self-)organize, communicate, and jointly act.  Examples for robotic applications are rescue expeditions in dangerous areas or expeditions in the oceans or on planets. The work of such a smart team has to be guided by strategies for exploration, for finding important objects, and for assigning to such an object a subgroup of robots that jointly have the capabilities necessary to process the object.

We use state-of-the-art algorithmic techniques to tackle these problems. The challenge is that all these tasks have to be executed by local, distributed strategies that act on the mobile network of the moving robots, and have to result in a robust, effective self-organization of the team. None of these robots will ever have more than very restricted, local knowledge about the global state of the system. Their decisions are solely based on their own observations and findings, from which a globally good behavior of the whole team has to emerge.