Multi-Robot Autonomous Cooperation Integrated with Immune Based Dynamic Task Allocation

Abstract

To efficiently accomplish unknown tasks in the multi-robot multi-task system, autonomous cooperation among robots is supposed to be integrated with task allocation. This paper proposes a new artificial immune network (AIN) model for the multi-robot system based on the principles of the biological immune system, which is fully distributed and sufficiently makes use of the interactions among antibodies. Then the multi-robot task allocation algorithm is designed based on AIN model, and the event-triggered task reallocation is adopted to realize the dynamic task allocation. Integrated with the dynamic task allocation, three different methods are proposed to implement the autonomous cooperation among robots based on the committed/opportunistic attribute of the robots. In the simulation and discussion, the immune based allocation method is further analyzed from the communication and computation aspects and compared. And in the experiment of autonomous emergency handling, the three integration methods are validated, studied and compared