Needs-driven Heterogeneous Multi-Robot Cooperation in Rescue Missions

Abstract

This paper focuses on the teaming aspects and the role of heterogeneity in a multi-robot system applied to robotaided urban search and rescue (USAR) missions. We specifically propose a needs-driven multi-robot cooperation mechanism represented through a Behavior Tree structure and evaluate the performance of the system in terms of the group utility and energy cost to achieve the rescue mission in a limited time.From the theoretical analysis, we prove that the needs-drive cooperation in a heterogeneous robot system enables higher group utility compared to a homogeneous robot system. We also perform simulation experiments to verify the proposed needsdriven cooperation and show that the heterogeneous multirobot cooperation can achieve better performance and increase system robustness by reducing uncertainty in task execution. Finally, we discuss the application to human-robot teaming.