Together with John NA Brown I am working on Networked Self-awareness for several years now – today, our article on the subject has been accepted for publication in the Transactions on Cyber-physical Systems. The paper is entitled “I Think Therefore You Are: Models for Interaction in Collectives of Self-Aware Cyber-physical Systems“.
Abstract: When multiple robots are required to collaborate in order to accomplish a specific task, they need to be coordinated in order to operate efficiently. To allow for scalability and robustness, we propose a novel distributed approach performed by autonomous robots based on their willingness to help each other. This willingness, based on their individual state, is used to inform a decision process of whether or not to interact with other robots within the environment. We study this new mechanism to form coalitions in the online multi-object k-coverage problem, and compare it with six other methods from the literature. We investigate the trade-off between the number of robots available and the number of potential targets in the environment. We show that the proposed method is able to provide comparable performance to the best method in the case of static targets, and to achieve a higher level of coverage with respect to the other methods when the targets are moving.