Decentralized Channel Access Mechanism Design for Multi-robot Coordination

With the expansion of decentralized multi-robot system's applications, limited communication resources has become a critical factor toward the efficiency of multi-robot coordination when both system sizes scale up and their tasks become more complex. In current researches, it is only possible for every robot in a decentralized setting either to choose a part of communication channels to communicate or interact with the other robots. However, due to the constraint on robots' limited communication capability as well as their local observations of the whole network, each robot's cooperative communication channel choice, based on the partial observation of the states of the system, and communication network is under uncertainty. It is also a major challenge to work out multi-robots' cooperative decision by uncertainty reasoning with only a partial observation to the environment. In this paper, we propose a decentralized approach that allows robots to cooperatively search channels and independently choose channels. The key of this approach is to build an up-to-date observation for each robot's view so that a local decision model is achievable. Based on this model, we simplify the Dec-POMDP problem model and each robot can jointly work out its communication policy in order to improve its local decision utilities for the choice of the communication channel using its current observation of the limited system's states as well as its neighbors' choices. In this way, an approximate balance between timeliness of decision making and cooperatively enhancing the efficiency of using these channels can be reached.