Abstract The tasks would fail to be assigned to any robots in the task allocation phase as a consequence of the inherent communication constraints in multi-robot systems (MRS). This negative effect becomes even more serious in tasks with temporal constraints. We therefore propose the constraint-based approach (CoBA), a market-based task allocation approach to enable multi-robot coordination in domains with temporal constraints between subtasks of a complex task and network constraints between robots. We handle network constraints by having each robot maintain a dynamic acquaintance network of robots that it knows about, and allowing a robot to submit a bid on behalf of another robot during a task auction (“indirect bidding”). In order to model the complex task, we introduce the AND/OR task tree with temporal constraints. An auction-clearing routine, which supports the AND/OR task tree with temporal constraints and direct/indirect task auction, is proposed to enable effective multi-robot task allocation in...
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