Coalition-based approach to task allocation of multiple robots with resource constraints

We propose a coalition-based approach to solve the task allocation problem of multiple robots with resource constraints. The resources required by task execution characterize the robots and tasks. Robots must form coalitions to accomplish the assigned tasks because individually, each robot may not complete the task independently due to resource limitation. We consider both online and offline assignment manners of the task allocation problem. For online assignment, a sequential coalition method is proposed to select efficiently the suitable robots to form coalitions for the assigned task. For offline assignment, a holistic coalition method is proposed for global optimization of all the assigned tasks. Both sequential and holistic coalition methods are compared with existing approaches. Numerous simulations and experiments performed on heterogeneous multiple mobile robots demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed coalition-based task allocation methods. © 2004-2012 IEEE.