Dynamic Heterogeneous Team Formation for Robotic Urban Search and Rescue

Though much work on coalition formation and maintenance exists from the standpoint of abstract agents, this has not yet translated well to the realm of physically grounded robots. Most multi-robot research has focused on pre-formed teams, with little attention to the formation and maintenance of the team itself. While this is plausible in forgiving domains, it fails rapidly in challenging environments where equipment is lost or broken easily, such as urban search and rescue. This paper describes the team management elements of a framework for coordinating a changing collection of heterogeneous robots operating in complex and dynamic environments such as disaster zones. Our framework helps a team to reshape itself to compensate for lost or failed robots, including adding newly-encountered robots or additions from other teams, and also allows new teams to be formed dynamically starting from an individual robot. We evaluate our framework through an example implementation where robots perform exploration in order to locate victims in a simulated disaster environment.