Towards a robust feedback system for coordinating a hierarchical multi-robot system

•A feedback coordination system for a hierarchical heterogeneous robot team is presented.•The system is designed to be used with a reduced human user input task allocation system.•Poor performance, partial failures, and complete failures are detected and corrected.•The system is robust to threshold variation and monitor time interval variation within the tested limits.

Restricting the usage of a team of robots to a few expert human users can be disadvantageous. In applications such as exploration, it may not always be possible for human experts to travel to sites, resulting in negative consequences. It is preferable to have a robotic system that is capable of coordinating itself based on inputs provided by non-expert human users. Hence, this paper presents the development of a robust feedback system for coordinating a hierarchical team of robots where inputs are specified by non-expert human users. Experiments with a multi-robot mapping and exploration task show that the feedback system successfully detects and corrects three types of failures. These are poor performance, partial failure and complete failure. Moreover, the system is robust to threshold value variation and monitor time interval variation within the tested limits.