Auction Mechanism Design for Multi-Robot Coordination

The design of cooperative multi-robot systems is a highly active research area in robotics. Two lines of research in particular have generated inter- est: the solution of large, weakly coupled MDPs, and the design and im- plementation of market architectures. We propose a new algorithm which joins together these two lines of research. For a class of coupled MDPs, our algorithm automatically designs a market architecture which causes a decentralized multi-robot system to converge to a consistent policy. We can show that this policy is the same as the one which would be produced by a particular centralized planning algorithm.