Cooperative control through objective achievement

Cooperative control is a key issue for multirobot systems in many practical applications. In this paper, we address the problem of coordinating a set of mobile robots in the RoboCup soccer middle-size league. We show how the coordination problem that we face can be cast as a specific coalition formation problem, and we propose a distributed algorithm to efficiently solve it. Our approach is based on the distributed computation of a measure of satisfaction (called Agent Satisfaction) that each agent computes for each task. We detail how each agent computes the Agent Satisfaction by acquiring sensor perceptions through an omnidirectional vision system, extracting aggregated information from the acquired perception, and integrating such information with that communicated by the teammates. We empirically validate our approach in a simulated scenario and within RoboCup competitions. The experiments in the simulated scenario allow us to analyse the behaviour of the algorithm in different situations, while the use of the algorithm in real competitions validates the applicability of our approach to robotic platforms involved in a dynamic and complex scenario.