Adaptive Autonomy in a Search and Rescue Scenario

Adaptive autonomy plays a major role in the design of multi-robots and multi-agent systems, where the need of collaboration for achieving a common goal is of primary importance. In particular, adaptation becomes necessary to deal with dynamic environments, and scarce available resources. In this paper, a mathematical framework for modelling the agents' willingness to interact and collaborate, and a dynamic adaptation strategy for controlling the agents' behavior, which accounts for factors such as progress toward a goal and available resources for completing a task among others, are proposed. The performance of the proposed strategy is evaluated through a fire rescue scenario, where a team of simulated mobile robots need to extinguish all the detected fires and save the individuals at risk, while having limited resources. The simulations are implemented as a ROS-based multi agent system, and results show that the proposed adaptation strategy provides a more stable performance than a static collaboration policy.