A Fast Distributed Auction and Consensus Process for Allocation of Prioritised Tasks in Multi-Robot Systems

Abstract

The effectiveness of a multi-robot system is directly related to the coordination and cooperation among the robots. Decentralised task allocation algorithms have been proposed by prior researchers as a compromise between the robustness and solution optimality, and such algorithms can easily be employed for large teams of robot. We present an auction based decentralised task allocation algorithm, for task allocation in parallel to the task execution, suitable for task allocation in dynamic environments and scalable to large robot groups. The performance of the proposed algorithm under different conditions is compared with other distributed consensus algorithms.