Distributed optimization in multi-agent robotics for industry 4.0 warehouses

Abstract

Robotic automation is being increasingly proselytized in the industrial and manufacturing sectors to increase production efficiency. Typically, complex industrial tasks cannot be satisfied by individual robots, rather coordination and information sharing is required. Centralized robotic control and coordination is ill-advised in such settings, due to high failure probabilities, inefficient overheads and lack of scalability. In this paper, we model the interactions among robotic units using intelligent agent based interactions. The autonomous behavior of these agents requires task/resource allocation to be performed via distributed algorithms. We use the motivating example of warehouse inventory automation to optimally allocate and distribute delivery tasks among multiple robotic agents. The optimization is decomposed using primal and dual decomposition techniques to operate in minimal latency, minimal battery usage or maximal utilization scenarios. These techniques may be applied to multiple deployments involving coordination and task allocation between autonomous agents.