A Spatial Queuing-Based Algorithm for Multi-Robot Task Allocation

• Published in: Robotics (Basel) Vol. 4; no. 3; pp. 316 - 340
• Main Authors: Lenagh, William, Dasgupta, Prithviraj, Munoz-Melendez, Angelica
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Basel MDPI AG 01.09.2015
• Subjects: Algorithms; Allocations; Computer simulation; multi-robot systems; Multiple robots; Queues; Robots; spatial queueing; State of the art; task allocation; Tasks
• DOI: 10.3390/robotics4030316
• ISSN: 2218-6581

Multi-robot task allocation (MRTA) is an important area of research in autonomous multi-robot systems. The main problem in MRTA is to allocate a set of tasks to a set of robots so that the tasks can be completed by the robots while ensuring that a certain metric, such as the time required to complete all tasks, or the distance traveled, or the energy expended by the robots is reduced. We consider a scenario where tasks can appear dynamically and a task needs to be performed by multiple robots to be completed. We propose a new algorithm called SQ-MRTA (Spatial Queueing-MRTA) that uses a spatial queue-based model to allocate tasks between robots in a distributed manner. We have implemented the SQ-MRTA algorithm on accurately simulated models of Corobot robots within the Webots simulator for different numbers of robots and tasks and compared its performance with other state-of-the-art MRTA algorithms. Our results show that the SQ-MRTA algorithm is able to scale up with the number of tasks and robots in the environment, and it either outperforms or performs comparably with respect to other distributed MRTA algorithms.