Date of Award

2012

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Electrical Engineering

First Advisor

Homaifar, Abdollah

Abstract

This dissertation studied the coordination problem for a Task Initiator (TI) with multiple ground stations (GSs). Each GS has a team of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that frequently collected data from a set of unattended ground sensors (UGSs) and delivered it to the source ground station (GS). The GSs made the information available to the TI. This problem formulated into a continuous, time-constrained version of the multi-travelling salesmen problem. A market-based coordination mechanism is presented that uses the concepts of price, revenue, cost, and a sequence of first-price, one-round auctions between the TI and GSs from one side, and double auction between GSs and UAVs from another side to distribute data collection tasks efficiently among team members. In a dynamic environment, this approach promises robustness, adaptation, and graceful degradation. Tasks from GS-to-UAV are double first-price sealed-bid sequential procurement auctions possibly with (additional) subcontracting (negotiation) and TI as a market matcher. To the author‘s knowledge, this is the first occurrence of using double auction as a coordination method in robot industries.

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