Hoplites is a market-based multirobot coordination framework I am developing to facilitate tight, complex interactions between teammates. It is intended for spatially complex domains such as perimeter sweeping, constrained exploration, and the art gallery problems that require teammates to take coordinated, complex paths through the environment to achieve the team mission.

Hoplites is market-based, meaning that robots simulate an economy in which tasks and resources can be bought and sold. Robots receive revenue for furthering the task, incur penalties for hindering the task, and incur costs for consuming team resources such as time and network bandwidth. By aligning the revenues and costs correctly, the team can find increasingly better solutions as individual robots act in a self-interested manner.

Within this market framework, Hoplites consists of two different coordination mechanisms. In simpler situations, the team can complete its task faster by utilizing the passive coordination mechanism which facilitates more local decision making and is light on both computation and communication. More complex scenarios require more complex interaction between teammates. This is provided by the active coordination mechanism which enables robots to actively influence each other's actions over the market. Robots can dynamically choose the coordination mechanism that best fits the current needs of the task.

We've tested Hoplites both in simulation and on a team of Pioneer DX-II robots. Simulation shows that Hoplites significantly outperforms its competitors. Details can be found on the publications page.

Good places to start:
The bibtex file from my thesis proposal. [.bib]
My database on CiteULike of recent papers.
Rob Zlot's list of market-based approaches to multirobot coordination.
The Multirobot Reading Group's website.

[Pioneers in High-Bay]This video shows a team of three Pioneer DX-II mobile robots sweeping a simple environment we set up in the high-bay at the FRC. This run demonstrates one of the environments we illustrate in the 2004 tech report. MPEG (3.6MB)

[Simulation] This is a simulation of a team of five robots sweeping a military base. Its not the highest quality but it demonstrates Hoplites on a much more complex environment. There are two instances of chained complex coordination, once at the very beginning and once about half way through the environment, both requiring the right-most robots. MPEG (1.2MB)

[Sweep Cartoon] Here's a 3-D animation of the concept of security sweeping. It contains two pioneer robots with limited scanning range that clear a corridor with three obstacles. MPEG (1.7MB)