Multi-Agent Sensor Data Collection with Attrition Risk

Book One

Volume

Proceedings of the International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling, 26

Main Track

We introduce a multi-agent route planning problem for col-lecting sensor data in hostile or dangerous environmentswhen communication is unavailable. Solutions must considerthe risk of losing robots as they travel through the environ-ment, maximizing the expected value of a plan. This requiresplans that balance the number of agents used with the riskof losing them and the data they have collected so far. Whilethere are existing approaches that mitigate risk during task as-signment, they do not explicitly account for the loss of robotsas part of the planning process. We analyze the unique prop-erties of the problem and provide a hierarchical agglomera-tive clustering algorithm that finds high value solutions withlow computational overhead. We show that our solution ishighly scalable, exhibiting performance gains on large problem instances with thousands of tasks.

10.1609/icaps.v26i1.13736