Abstract. Staged at Piombino, Italy in September 2015, euRathlon 2015 was the world's first multi-domain (air, land and sea) multi-robot search and rescue competition. In a mock-disaster scenario inspired by the 2011 Fukushima NPP accident, the euRathlon 2015 Grand Challenge required teams of robots to cooperate to map the area, find missing workers and stem a leak. In this paper we outline the euRathlon 2015 Grand Challenge and the approach used to benchmark and score teams. We conclude the paper with an evaluation of both the competition and the performance of the robot-robot teams in the Grand Challenge.
Planning for and coordinating robots in a multi-robot system (MRS) is crucial for optimizing the performance of the whole MRS. Thus a plan for the movement of the MRS must exist. If some centralized entity calculates the plan, it may result in one plan for the whole group. Such a global plan, which shows how the MRS can reach a goal state, has to be transformed into action guidelines for each robot. This task becomes harder if such a global plan includes dependencies caused by necessary cooperation of the robots. In this paper we present an approach to transform a global multi-robot plan into single-robot actions. We also provide a method to determine how many robots are needed to fulfil the global plan while obeying some constraints. Here we use plans generated by a coordinated navigation planner with spatial constraints, but the method could be expanded to a more general class of plans built from a centralized entity.
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