Decentralized Task Allocation in Lossy Networks: A Simulation Study

摘要

Advances in hardware, software and sensing are bringing swarms of robots to daily life. A major challenge in enabling such applications is multi-robot coordination. Most multi-robot coordination algorithms are developed under the assumption of perfect communication, which does not hold in practical wireless networks. To understand the consequences of this, we investigate the performance of a representative task allocation algorithm for multi-robot systems, namely, the Asynchronous Consensus Based Bundle Algorithm (ACBBA), in realistic network conditions. We show that the ACBBA deviates from its desired theoretical behavior when deployed in a realistic network. This manifests in the form of redundant task assignments across agents, which violates the algorithm's "conflict-free" assignment constraint and degrades the task allocation efficiency. We explore several network-based mitigations to this problem.