No abstract

Because of high speed, efficiency, robustness and flexibility of multi-agent systems, in recent years there has been an increasing interest in the art of these systems. Artificial market mechanisms are one of the well-known negotiation multi-agent protocols in multi-agent systems. In this paper artificial capital market as a new variant of market mechanism is introduced and employed in a multi-robot foraging problem. In this artificial capital market, the robots are going to benefit via investment on some assets, defined as doing foraging task. Each investment has a cost and an outcome. Limited initial capital of the investors constrains their investments. A negotiation protocol is proposed for decision making of the agents. Qualitative analysis reveals speed of convergence, near optimal solutions and robustness of the algorithm. Numerical analysis shows advantages of the proposed method over two previously developed heuristics in terms of four performance criteria.

Distributed planning and decision making can be beneficial from the robustness, adaptability and fault tolerance in multi-robot systems. Distributed mechanisms have not been employed in three dimensional transportation systems namely aerial and underwater environments. This paper presents a distributed cooperation mechanism on multi robot transportation problem in three dimensional environments. The cooperation mechanism is based on artificial capital market, a newly introduced market based negotiation protocol. In the proposed mechanism contributing in transportation task is defined as asset. Each robot is considered as an investor who decides if he is going to invest on some assets. The decision is made based on environmental constraint including fuel limitation and distances those are modeled as capital and cost. Simulations show effectiveness of the algorithm in terms of robustness, speed and adaptability.