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To address this issue, this paper proposes to decentralize multi-robot partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) while maintaining cooperation between robots by using POMDP policy auctions. Auctions provide a flexible way of coordinating individual policies modeled by POMDPs and have low communication requirements. In addition, communication models in the multi-agent POMDP literature severely mismatch with real inter-robot communication. We address this issue by exploiting a decentralized data fusion method in order to efficiently maintain a joint belief state among the robots. The paper presents two different applications: environmental monitoring with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs); and cooperative tracking, in which several robots have to jointly track a moving target of interest. The first one is used as a proof of concept and illustrates the proposed ideas through different simulations. The second one adds real multi-robot experiments, showcasing the flexibility and robust coordination that our techniques can provide. <\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1177\/0278364913483345","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2013,6,7]],"date-time":"2013-06-07T09:30:49Z","timestamp":1370597449000},"page":"650-671","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1177\/sage-journals-update-policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":96,"title":["Decentralized multi-robot cooperation with auctioned POMDPs"],"prefix":"10.1177","volume":"32","author":[{"given":"Jesus","family":"Capitan","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"University of Duisburg-Essen, Duisburg, Germany"}]},{"given":"Matthijs T.J.","family":"Spaan","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands"}]},{"given":"Luis","family":"Merino","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Pablo de Olavide University, Seville, 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