Task Allocation in Robotic Swarms: Explicit Communication Based Approaches

Abstract

In this paper we study multi robot cooperative task allocation issue in a situation where a swarm of robots is deployed in a confined unknown environment where the number of colored spots which represent tasks and the ratios of them are unknown. The robots should cover this spots as far as possible to do cleaning and sampling actions desirably. It means that they should discover the spots cooperatively and spread proportional to the spots area and avoid from remaining idle. We proposed 4 self-organized distributed methods which are called hybrid methods for coping with this scenario. In two different experiments the performance of the methods is analyzed. We compared them with each other and investigated their scalability and robustness in term of single point of failure.