Market-Based Multirobot Coordination: A Survey and Analysis

Source: Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute publication page Authors: M. Bernardine Dias, Robert Zlot, Nidhi Kalra, Anthony Stentz Date: 2006-07 Venue: Proceedings of the IEEE 94(7)

Key points

• Surveys market-based coordination as an alternative to direct centralized scheduling for teams of robots.
• Models robots as self-interested agents trading tasks and resources in a virtual economy, with team efficiency emerging from local profit-seeking decisions.
• Highlights the engineering appeal of market mechanisms: flexibility, responsiveness, robustness, scalability, and generality.
• Also makes the dependence on correct bidding and utility design explicit, which is the main warning for agent-runtime adoption.