Autonomous Role Assignment in a Homogeneous Multi-Robot System

This paper describes an approach for controlling an autonomous homogeneous multi-robot system. An extremely important topic for this type of system is the design of an on-line autonomous behavior acquisition mechanism that is capable of developing cooperative roles as well as assigning them to a robot appropriately in a noisy embedded environment. Our approach applies reinforcement learning that adopts the Bayesian discrimination method for segmenting a continuous state space and a continuous action space simultaneously. In addition, a neural network is provided for predicting the average of the other robots’ postures at the next time step in order to stabilize the reinforcement learning environment. The proposed method is validated through computer simulations as well as our hand-made multi-robot system.