Market-based approach to Multi-robot Task Allocation

Abstract

This paper presents a market-based approach used for solving the Multi-robot Task Allocation (MRTA) problem that arises in the context of Multi-robot Systems (MRS). The proposed approach is used to find the best allocation of a number of heterogeneous robots to a number of heterogeneous tasks. The approach was extensively tested over a number of test scenarios in order to test its capability of handling complex constrained MRS applications that included extended number of tasks and robots. Finally a comparative study is implemented between the proposed market-based approach and two optimization-based approaches, the results show that the optimization-based approaches outperformed the market-based approach in terms of best allocation and computational time, however, in terms of capabilities matching the difference between both algorithms is very minimal.