Multi-robot systems (MRS) accomplish many missions with different complexities, and their applications range from search-and-rescue and surveillance to transportation and entertainment. In many missions, multiple robots need to cooperate to complete tasks. The workflow of these multi-robot tasks involves forming coalitions of robots, assigning them to available tasks, and jointly executing the tasks.

In her Ph.D. thesis Petra Mazdin investigates such a workflow in an application-independent yet realistic setting. She abstracts the key properties of tasks and robots and proposes three distributed coalition formation and task assignment methods. Distributed methods rely on a timely and accurate exchange of state information in the MRS. In her recent work, she focused on two important communication aspects: (i) how to achieve consistent coalition formation and task assignment in the presence of communication faults, and (ii) how to reduce the communication effort required for the state updates in the MRS.

Petra Mazdin and Bernhard Rinner. Distributed and Communication-Aware Coalition Formation and Task Assignment in Multi-Robot Systems. IEEE Access, 2021. (early access)