Using a sensor network for distributed multi-robot task allocation

Abstract

We present a multi field distributed in-network task allocation (DINTA-MF) algorithm for online multi-robot task allocation (OMRTA) where tasks are allocated explicitly to robots by a pre-deployed, static sensor network. The idea of DINTA-MF is to compute several assignment fields in the sensor network and then distributively assign fields to different robots. Experimental results with a simulated alarm scenario show that our approach is able to compute solutions to the OMRTA problem in a distributed fashion and arguably in an optimal way. We compared DINTA-MF with a simpler implementation (DINTA), which uses one assignment field. The data show that DINTA-MF outperforms DINTA as the number of robots increases.