Improving Sequential Single-Item Auctions

— We study how to improve sequential single-item auctions that assign targets to robots for exploration tasks such as environmental clean-up, space-exploration, and search and rescue missions. We exploit the insight that the resulting travel distances are small if the bidding and winner-determination rules are designed to result in hillclimbing, namely to assign an additional target to a robot in each round of the sequential single-item auction so that the team cost increases the least. We study the impact of increasing the lookahead of hillclimbing and using roll-outs to improve the evaluation of partial target assignments. We describe the bidding and winner-determination rules of the resulting sequential single-item auctions and evaluate them experimentally, with surprising results: Larger lookaheads do not improve sequential single-item auctions reliably while only a small number of roll-outs in early rounds already improve them substantially.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: IROS
• Authors: Xiaoming Zheng, Sven Koenig, Craig A. Tovey
• Keywords: IROS 2006, Partial Target Assignments, Robotics, Sequential Single-item Auctions, Winner-determination Rules