A comprehensive taxonomy for multi-robot task allocation

Abstract

Task allocation is an important aspect of many multi-robot systems. The features and complexity of multi-robot task allocation (MRTA) problems are dictated by the requirements of the particular domain under consideration. These problems can range from those involving instantaneous distribution of simple, independent tasks among members of a homogenous team, to those requiring the time-extended scheduling of complex interrelated multi-step tasks for members of a heterogenous team related by several constraints. The existing widely used taxonomy for task allocation in multi-robot systems was designed for problems with independent tasks and does not deal with problems with interrelated utilities and constraints. While that taxonomy was a groundbreaking contribution to the MRTA literature, a survey of recent work in MRTA reveals that it is no longer a sufficient taxonomy, due to the increasing importance of interrelated utilities and constraints in realistic MRTA problems under consideration. Thus, in this paper, we present a new, comprehensive taxonomy, iTax, that explicitly takes into consideration the issues of interrelated utilities and constraints. Our taxonomy maps categories of MRTA problems to existing mathematical models from combinatorial optimization and operations research, and hence draws important parallels between robotics and these fields.

Evaluating Multi-Robot Teamwork in Parameterised Environments

“…Korsah et al [12] provide a comprehensive discussion of prior work in this domain, across a range of task allocation methodologies (not just auction-based). In the work presented here, we focus on dynamic allocation environments and present experimental evaluations of MR-CT-DA, MR-IT-DA, SR-CT-DA and SR-IT-DA.…”

“…Auction-based approaches to task allocation have been proposed for tasks with precedence [17], with temporal [8,20] constraints, and for dynamic environments [25] with single robot tasks. Environments that contain multi-robot tasks, with and without constraints, are less well investigated than their single-robot counterparts [12].…”

Solving the task variant allocation problem in distributed robotics

“…Moreover, the methods were categorised as centralised or distributed. Each publication was then characterised based on the extended taxonomy found in Korsah et al (2013). From this information the search space N max was calculated for each publication using Eq.…”

Hybrid mission planning with coalition formation

“…The iTax taxonomy extended the Gerkey and Matarić taxonomy to include varying levels of task dependence (Korsah et al, 2013). Four levels of task dependence are used: no dependencies, in-schedule dependencies, cross-schedule dependencies, and complex dependencies.…”