Team-Aware Multirobot Strategy for Cooperative Path Clearing

Abstract

In this paper, we present a simulated version of a poten-tial demining problem in which robotic minesweepers clear a battle area of anti-tank mines to enable troops to breach the field. The demining problem is modeled as a distributed optimization problem in which the robots strive to minimize an abstract cost function. Robots were simulated using the Java based simulator, TeamBots (www.teambots.org). The demining robots are responsible for clearing a direct vertical path between the top and bottom edges of the mine-field. At each time step, robots must select one of three pos-sible actions: move, scan, or defuse. Each action has a time cost associated with it that represents the relative difficulty of the task for the robot; deactivating mines is not explicitly modeled in the simulation as an actuation task. This problem has characteristics of the consume and graze tasks described