Counter-Misdirection in Behavior-based Multi-robot Teams

When teams of mobile robots are tasked with different goals in a competitive environment, misdirection and counter-misdirection can provide significant advantages. Researchers have studied different misdirection methods but the number of approaches on counter-misdirection for multi-robot systems is still limited. In this work, a novel counter-misdirection approach for behavior-based multi-robot teams is developed by deploying a new type of agent: counter-misdirection agents (CMAs). These agents can detect the misdirection process and “push back” the misdirected agents collaboratively to stop the misdirection process. This approach has been implemented not only in simulation for various conditions, but also on a physical robotic testbed to study its effectiveness. It shows that this approach can stop the misdirection process effectively with a sufficient number of CMAs. This novel counter-misdirection approach can potentially be applied to different competitive scenarios such as military and sports applications.