Market-based Multirobot Coordination for Complex Tasks

Current technological developments and application-driven demands are bringing us closer to the realization of autonomous multirobot systems performing increasingly complex missions. However, existing methods of distributing mission subcomponents among multirobot teams do not explicitly handle the required complexity and instead treat tasks as simple indivisible entities, ignoring any inherent structure and semantics that such complex tasks might have. These task properties can be exploited to produce more efficient team plans by giving individual robots the ability to come up with new, more localized ways to perform a task; by allowing multiple robots to cooperate by sharing the subcomponents of a task; or both. In this paper, we describe the complex task allocation problem and present a distributed solution for efficiently allocating a set of complex tasks among a robot team. Complex tasks are tasks that can be solved in many possible ways. In contrast, simple tasks can be accomplis...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2006
• Where: IJRR
• Authors: Robert Zlot, Anthony Stentz
• Keywords: Complex Task Allocation, Complex Tasks, IJRR 2006, Team