Integrated Mission Specification and Task Allocation for Robot Teams - Part 2: Testing and Evaluation

Abstract

This work presents the evaluation of two mission specification and task allocation architectures. These architectures, described in part 1 of this paper, present novel means with which to integrate a case-based reasoning (CBR) mission planner with contract net protocol (CNP) based task allocation. In the first design, the CBR and runtime-CNP architecture, the case-based mission planner generates mission plans that support necessary behaviors for CNP-based task allocation and execution. In the second design, the CBR and premission-CNP architecture, task allocation takes place during mission specification. The results of an empirical evaluation of the CBR and runtime-CNP across three naval scenarios is described. Finally, we briefly describe an earlier usability evaluation of the CBR and premission-CNP architecture using goals, operators, methods, and selection rules modeling.