An evolutionary approach to route the heterogeneous groups of underwater robots

Abstract

An evolutionary approach to solve the dynamic routing problem for the heterogeneous group of robots is presented. Since robots in the group may differ by their speed and, more importantly, by their functionality, each robot is able of performing only a specific subset of tasks among all tasks of the mission. The routing problem is to find a feasible group route ensuring well-timed accomplishment of all tasks. We propose a variation of the evolutionary algorithm to effectively solve the problem described. The heterogeneity factor implies some specific constraints on the genetic operators, thus we have developed both a new multi-mode mutation and crossover operators as well as the adapted algorithm structure to answer these changes. A software modeling system implementing all the necessary computational procedures has been developed; the results of computations are given.