Abstract

Abstract: 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.

Download the paper in pdf.

Many publishers do not want authors to make their papers available electronically after the papers have been published. Please use the electronic versions provided here only if hardcopies are not yet available. If you have comments on any of these papers, please send me an email! Also, please send me your papers if we have common interests.

This page was automatically created by a bibliography maintenance system that was developed as part of an undergraduate research project, advised by Sven Koenig.