Multi-Robot Dynamic Role Assignment and Coordination Through Shared Potential Fields

Role assignment and coordination are difficult issues for multi-robot systems, especially in highly dynamic tasks. Robot soccer is one such task and it provides a unique challenge for multi-robot research. In this paper, we contribute the approach that we successfully developed for CMPACK'02 , our team for the RoboCup-2002 Sony legged league. The RoboCup-2002 Sony robots were equipped with wireless communication for the first time this year. We developed an approach for sharing sensed in- formation and effective coordination through the introduction of shared potential fields. The potential fields were based on the po- sitions of the other robots on the team and the ball. The robots po- sitioned themselves on the field by following the gradient to a min- imum of the potential field. In principle, our potential functions can be applied to any multi-robot domain. We present the results of the RoboCup-2002 competition, which we won, and we show a post-competition, controlled empirical evaluation to analyze the impact of our algorithm. The results demonstrate that our team using our communication-dependent coordination outperforms a team of individually skilled robots without coordination.