Preface

      Coordination is a fundamental trait in lower level organisms as they used their collective effort to serve their goals. Hundreds of interesting examples of coordination are available in nature. For example, ants individually cannot carry a small food item, but they collectively carry quite a voluminous food to their nest. The tracing of the trajectory of motion of an ant following the pheromone deposited by its predecessor also is attractive. The queen bee in her nest directs the labor bees to specific directions by her dance patterns and gestures to collect food resources. These natural phenomena often remind us the scope of coordination among agents to utilize their collective intelligence and activities to serve complex goals.

      Coordination and planning are closely related terminologies from the domain of multi‐robot system. Planning refers to the collection of feasible steps required to reach a predefined goal from a given position. However, coordination indicates the skillful interaction among the agents to generate a feasible planning step. Therefore, coordination is an important issue in the field of multi‐robot coordination to address complex real‐world problems. Coordination usually is of three different types: cooperation, competition, and mixed. As evident from their names, cooperation refers to improving the performance of the agents to serve complex goals, which otherwise seems to be very hard for an individual agent because of the restricted availability of hardware/software resources of the agents or deadline/energy limits of the tasks. Unlike cooperation, competition refers to serving conflicting goals by two (team of) agents. For example, in robot soccer, the two teams compete to win the game. Here, each team plans both offensively and defensively to score goals and thus act competitively. Mixed coordination indicates a mixture of cooperation and competition. In the example of a soccer game, inter‐team competition and intra‐team cooperation is the mixed coordination. Most of the common usage of coordination in robotics lies in cooperation of agents to serve a common goal. The book deals with the cooperation of robots/robotic agents to efficiently complete a complex task.

In recent times, researchers are taking keen interest to employ machine learning in multi‐agent cooperation. The primary advantage of machine learning is to generate the action plans in sequence from the available sensory readings of the robots. In case of a single robot, learning the action plans from the sensory readings is straightforward. However, in the context of multi‐robot, the positional changes of the other robots act as additional inputs for the learner robot, and thus learning is relatively difficult. Several machine learning and evolutionary algorithms have been adopted over the last two decades to handle the situations. The simplest of all is the supervised learning technique that requires an exhaustive list of sensory instances and the action plan by the robots. Usually, a human experimenter provides these data from his/her long acquaintance with such problems or by direct measurement of the sensory instances and decisions. The training instances being too large, sometimes has a negative influence to the engineer, and he/she feels it uncomfortable not to miss a single instance that carries valuable mapping from sensory instance to action plan by the robots.

      Because of the difficulty of generating training instances and excessive computational overhead to learn those instances, coupled with the need for handling dynamic situations, researchers felt the importance of reinforcement learning (RL). In RL, we need not provide any training instance, but employ a critic who provides a feedback to the learning algorithm about the possible reward/penalty of the actions by the agent. The agent/s on receiving the approximate measure of penalty/reward understands which particular sensory‐motor instances they need to learn for future planning applications. The dynamic nature of environment thus can easily be learned by RL. In the multi‐agent scenario, RL needs to take care of learning in joint state/action space of the agents. Here, each agent learns the sensory‐motor instances in the joint state/action space with an ultimate motive to learn the best actions for itself to optimize its rewards.

      The superiority of evolutionary algorithms (EAs) in optimizing diverse objective functions is subjected to the No Free Lunch Theorem (NFLT).