Multi-Robot Foraging Based on Contract Net Protocol

Because of high speed, efficiency, robustness and flexibility of multi-agentsystems, in recent years there has been an increasing interest in the art of thesesystems. In competitive multi agent systems, a mechanism is required via which theagents can come to reach an agreement. Contract net protocols are one of the wellknownnegotiation protocols in multi-agent systems. In contract net protocol, eachagent can be a manager or a contractor. The managers announce available tasksand the contractors bid over the tasks. Then, the managers investigate received bidsand decide which contractor could perform the task. The decision is made based onan eligibility function. In this paper, a multi robot foraging problem is consideredwhere mobile robots with limited energy resource try to transport some movingobjects to a collection point. The problem is modeled as a contract net system andthen solved. Efficiency of the algorithm and optimality of solutions are investigatedby provided examples and simulations.

Keywords:

Distributed Artificial Intelligence , Multi-agent systems , Contract Net Protocol , Foraging Robots