Helping Instead Of Replacing - Towards A Shared Task Allocation Architecture

Some failures cause the robots to loss parts of their capabilities, so that they cannot perform their assigned tasks. Considering requirements of typical robotic teams during different missions, a distributed behavior based control architecture is introduced in this paper. This architecture is based on an enhanced version of ALLIANCE, and provides the robots the ability of performing shared tasks based on help requests. The architecture contains a mechanism for adaptive action selection and a communication protocol for information and task sharing which are required for coordination of team members. The proposed architecture is used in a box pushing mission where heterogeneous robots push several boxes with different masses.