Improving the Connectivity of Multi-hop Communication Networks Through Auction-Based Multi-robot Task Allocation

Abstract

AbstractA key step in the execution of any multi-robot mission is solving the multi-robot task allocation problem. It consists in assigning the tasks of the mission to the robots and might be described by an integer programming problem. To solve multi-robot task allocation, researchers have proposed many approaches. Among these, auction-based approaches received a lot of attention from researchers, as they are able to quickly reallocate tasks when needed. In this paper, we introduce a new term in the evaluation of bids for an auction-based task allocation protocol. This new term enables us to account for the connectivity of the communication network, which represents the communication links between the robots. The connectivity of the communication network is key to the efficiency of auction-based methods, as they need to share data as broadly as possible to produce efficient allocations. We evaluated our method in a surveillance scenario. We derived theoretical bounds of the time complexity of the evaluation of the bids and of the size of the data shared during the mission. We demonstrated through simulation experiments that our approach improves the robustness of the multi-robot system to dynamic events.KeywordsMulti-robot systemsTask allocationMarket-based approach