Map Focus: a way to reconcile reactivity and deliberation in multi-robot systems

Cooperative multirobot systems require both real-time responsiveness and some form of coordination to get the desired overall behavior. This can be obtained with a combined use of reactive and deliberative subsystems. In this paper, we illustrate an effective technique for putting together these two components. The method is based on the idea that every robot maintains a local map and then dynamically focuses its attention on the part which is relevant in the current context. The framework, which is fully distributed and scalable, is enriched with cooperative behaviors, i.e. behaviors pursued by more than one robot. We provide the details of how the proposed idea has been studied in a simulated cooperative foraging task and proved to be effective.