Autonomous Learning of Target Decision Strategies without Communications for Continuous Coordinated Cleaning Tasks

Abstract

We propose a method for the autonomous learning of target decision strategies for coordination in the continuous cleaning domain. With ongoing advances in computer and sensor technologies, we can expect robot applications for covering large areas that often require coordinated/cooperative activities by multiple robots. In this paper, we focus the cleaning tasks by multiple robots or by agents, software to control the robots. We assume that agents cannot directly exchange internal information such as plans and targets for coordination, but rather individually learn their target decision strategies by observing how much trash/dirt has been vacuumed up in the multi-agent system environments. We experimentally evaluated the proposed method by comparing its performance with those obtained by the regimes of agents with a single strategy. Results showed that the proposed method enables agents to select target decision strategies from their own perspectives, resulting in the appropriate combinations of multiple strategies.