On-line decision-making in multi-robot coordination

On-line decision making is an important part of robotic problems where mobile robots operate in unknown or partially known dynamic environments in order to acquire information about some studied phenomena. This problem can be found in the robotic problems like autonomous data collection, environment monitoring, and robotic exploration missions that can be generally considered as variants of robotic information gathering. The key aspect of these problems is that the overall mission performance can be evaluated after the mission is completed and efficient decision-making depends on local in-situ decisions made according to the information acquired during the mission. The main goal of the workshop is to discuss and share ideas and approaches related to the on-line (in-situ) decision-making to coordinate a team of mobile robots to fulfill a global mission objective by individual actions performed by particular team members. The particular focus of the workshop are missions like multi-robot exploration, persistent environment monitoring, surveillance and reconnaissance tasks. The fundamental challenge of these missions is that little or no information about the environment is known in advance. Therefore, one of the problems needed to be addressed is how to trade-off exploration of the unknown parts of the environment to collect new information about the operational environment and exploitation of the current knowledge acquired so far to improve the mission performance.