Heterogeneous Multirobot Coordination with Spatial and Temporal Constraints

Existing approaches to multirobot coordination separate scheduling and task allocation, but finding the optimal schedule with joint tasks and spatial constraints requires robots to simultaneously solve the scheduling, task allocation, and path planning problems. We present a formal description of the multirobot joint task allocation problem with heterogeneous capabilities and spatial constraints and an instantiation of the problem for the search and rescue domain. We introduce a novel declarative framework for modeling the problem as a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) problem and present a centralized anytime algorithm with error bounds. We demonstrate that our algorithm can outperform standard MILP solving techniques, greedy heuristics, and a market based approach which separates scheduling and task allocation.

Authors

• Mary Koes Illah Nourbakhsh

Keywords

No keywords are indexed for this paper.