Avoid communication outages in decentralized planning

Abstract

This paper proposes an extension to the Consensus-Based Bundle Algorithm (CBBA), a distributed task allocation framework previously developed at the Aerospace Control Laboratory (ACL), MIT, designed to address complex mission planning for a team of heterogeneous agents operating in a dynamic environment. A key assumption of CBBA involves having a connected network, a constraint which is not always feasible in realistic mission scenarios. In this paper, we present a mechanism that aims at preventing and repairing network disconnects. The dynamic network topology is predicted using available information within the planner and relay tasks are created to strengthen the connectivity of the network. By employing underutilized resources, the presented approach improves network connectivity without limiting the scope of the active agents thus improving mission performance.