This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. These works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder. The coordination of a large group of robots to solve a specified task is a difficult problem.
Centralized approaches can be computationally intractable, brittle, and unresponsive to change.
Distributed approaches are not as prone to these problems, but they can be highly sub-optimal. This work introduces a novel approach for coordinating robots based on the free market system. Market economies are a proven way to organize a large number of individuals into a productive group. The free market approach defines revenue and cost functions across the possible plans for executing a specified task. Cooperation and competition emerge as the robots execute the task while trying to maximize their personal profits.