Allocating structured tasks in heterogeneous agent teams

Abstract

Abstract Task allocation is an important aspect of multiagent coordination. However, there are many challenges in developing appropriate strategies for multiagent teams so that they operate efficiently. Real‐world scenarios such as flooding disasters usually require the use of heterogeneous robots and the execution of tasks with different structures and complexities. In this paper, we propose a decentralized task allocation mechanism considering different types of tasks for heterogeneous agent teams where agents play different roles and carry out tasks according to their own capabilities. We have run several experiments to evaluate the proposed mechanism. The results show that the proposed mechanism appears to scale well and provides near‐optimal allocations.