Nowhere to Go: Benchmarking Multirobot Collaboration in Target Trapping Environment

Collaboration is one of the most important factors in multirobot systems. Considering certain real-world applications and to further promote its development, we propose a new benchmark to evaluate multirobot collaboration in target trapping environment (T2E). In T2E, two kinds of robots (called
captor robot
and
target robot
) share the same space. The captors aim to catch the target collaboratively, while the target will try to escape from the trap. Both the trapping and escaping process can use the environment layout to help achieve the corresponding objective, which requires high collaboration between robots and the utilization of the environment. For the benchmark, we present and evaluate multiple learning-based baselines in T2E, and provide insights into regimes of multirobot collaboration. We also make our benchmark publicly available and encourage researchers from related robotics disciplines to propose, evaluate, and compare their solutions in this benchmark.