oriented plan
Team Oriented Plans and Robot Swarms
Scerri, Paul (Carnegie Mellon Robotics)
Many interesting real-world tasks might be most efficiently, effectively and safely achieved with large teams of robots working together. For domains such as the military, rescue response and environmental monitoring, the ability for the team to be spread out in the environment collecting information and taking action is a key enabler. Over an extended period of time, we have developed an infrastructure that can be quickly implemented on a robot or software agent to allow that agent to become part of a team. That infrastructure, called Machinetta, works by implementing a theory of teamwork that knows how to execute Team Oriented Plans. The infrastructure understands how to allocate roles, share information, recover from failures and other routine coordination activities that do not need to be specified in the plan. In most applications of Machinetta, invocation of Team Oriented Plans is the mechanism by which the operator interacts with the team, letting them specify the team activities without worrying about low-level details. Recently we have extended the team oriented plan concept to include situational awareness and mixed initiative markup that tells the GUI what information and options to give to the operator at different points during plan execution. In recent experiments with teams of boats, we have begun including swarming behaviors as a part of the team plan, when useful. The innvocation of swarming behavior from within Team Oriented Plans, offers a new way of interacting with very large robotic teams.