A centralized approach for resolving physical interference between robots using nearest first swarm method

Abstract

Task allocation, where tasks must be executed before deadline, is one of the major research area in multi-robot system. For efficient task allocation, physical interference between robots must be taken into account i.e. when two or more robots are assigned the same task at the same time. Nearest first swarm (NFS), one of the simplest Swarm robot task allocation strategy, is used to analyze the influence of interference in multi-robot system. This paper proposes a new approach for resolving interference in accordance with the assigned priority to robots in a multi-robot task allocation system(MRTA). Major factors that are considered for defining priority among the robots are remaining energy of the robot, task completed by individuals robot and distance to the object. A default priority is used to resolve interference when two or more homogeneous robots look for same the task. Results show that the proposed technique of interference resolution helps in improving system performance by 17 %. A foraging mission has been taken as a ground to verify the result of our method.