Needs-driven Heterogeneous Multi-Robot Cooperation in Rescue Missions

This paper focuses on the teaming aspects and the role of heterogeneity in a multi-robot system applied to robot-aided urban search and rescue (USAR) missions. We specifically propose a needs-driven multi-robot cooperation mechanism represented through a Behavior Tree structure and evaluate the performance of the system in terms of the group utility and energy cost to achieve the rescue mission in a limited time. From the theoretical analysis, we prove that the needs-drive cooperation in a heterogeneous robot system enables higher group utility compared to a homogeneous robot system. We also perform simulation experiments to verify the proposed needs-driven cooperation and show that the heterogeneous multi-robot cooperation can achieve better performance and increase system robustness by reducing uncertainty in task execution. Finally, we discuss the application to human-robot teaming.