Enabling Autonomous Sensor-Sharing for Tightly-Coupled Cooperative Tasks

This paper presents a mechanism enabling robot team members to share sensor information to achieve tightly-coupled cooperative tasks. This approach, called ASyMTRe, is based on a distributed extension of schema theory that allows schema-based building blocks to be interconnected in many ways, regardless of whether they are on the same or different robots. The inputs and outputs of schema are labeled with an information type, inspired by the theory of information invariants. By enabling robots to autonomously configure their distributed schema connections based on the flow of information through the system, robot teams with different collective capabilities are able to generate significantly different cooperative control strategies for solving the same task. We demonstrate the ability of this approach to generate different cooperative control strategies in a proof-of-principle implementation on physical robots performing a simple transportation task.