Multi-robot task allocation and scheduling based on fish swarm algorithm

Abstract

The problem of multi robot task allocation and scheduling is to assign more relative tasks to less relative robots and to scheme task processing sequence so as to minimize the processing time of these tasks. The key of this problem is to allocate proper quantity of tasks for each robot and schedule the optimal task sequence for each robot. In order to minimize the processing time for robots, an optimized multiple robots task allocation and scheduling approach based on fish swarm algorithm is proposed. In this approach, the optimized task sequence is first schemed using fish swarm algorithm on the assumption that all the tasks are processed by one robot. Then, according to the number of the robots, the task sequence has been randomly divided into several task segments that will be assigned to robots. At last, the task numbers of each task segments are averaged according to the time each robot used, therefore proper quantity of tasks is allocated to each robot and the optimized task allocation scheme is got. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, experiments and simulation have been made. The results show that the proposed approach can scheme optimized multi robots task allocation and scheduling scheme.