Multi-robot routing with rewards and disjoint time windows

Abstract

Multiple robots are often faster and more fault- tolerant than single robots for applications such as planetary exploration and search and rescue. We study applications where robots move in two-dimensional terrain and have to visit targets of given priorities during given time windows that do not overlap. We analyze the complexity of these coordination tasks and, where possible, use techniques from operations research to develop coordination methods that are efficient and optimize the team performance. We then develop auction-based coordination methods that build on these results and show experimentally that they run in seconds and achieve good team performance for NP-hard coordination tasks.