Dynamic token generation for constrained tasks in a multi-robot system

Abstract

The problem of assigning tasks to a group of robots acting in a dynamic environment is a fundamental issue for a MRS and is relevant to several real world applications. Several techniques have been studied to address this problem, however when the system needs to scale up with size, communication quickly becomes an important issue to address; moreover, tasks to be executed can be tied by constraints that have to be considered in the task assignment process. We present a distributed task assignment approach that ensures very low communication overhead and can manage constraints among roles. The basic idea of our approach is to use tokens to represent tasks to be executed, each team member creates, executes and propagates tokens based on a broad knowledge of their team mates. We test and evaluate our approach by means of experiments both on a simulates and on a real robot scenario.