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Reducing spatial interference in robot teams by local-investment aggression

This paper extends and improves upon our previous work on the use of stereotypical aggressive display behavior to reduce interference in robot teams, and thus improve their overall efficiency. We examine a team of robots with no centralized control performing a transportation task in which robots frequently interfere with each other. The robots must work in the same space, so territorial methods are not appropriate. In our method, when robots come into competition for floor space, each selects an aggression level and the competition is resolved in favor of the more aggressive robot. Our recent work showed that choosing aggression proportional to task investment can produce better overall system performance compared to aggression chosen at random. This paper describes a new technique, local investment, for computing an aggression level that performs better than any previous method and relies only on local sensor data. The method is evaluated in a simulation study, and is then shown to be effective in a real-world robot implementation.