Robot coordination with ad-hoc team formation

Abstract

Coordinating multiagent systems to maximize global information collection both presents scientific challenges (what should each agent aim to achieve?) and provides application opportunities (planetary exploration, search and rescue). In particular, in many domains where communication is expensive (for example, because of limited power or computation), the coordination must be achieved in a passive manner, without agents explicitly informing other agents of their states and/or intended actions. In this work, we extend results on such multiagent coordination algorithms to domains where the agents cannot achieve the required tasks without forming teams.