Multi-robot routing for servicing spatio-temporal requests: A musically inspired problem

Multi-robot routing under connectivity constraints

“…In this section, we highlight the various design characteristics targetted towards optimizing the total length of robot trajectories. To begin with, the Trajectories algorithm uses optimal positions of robots, obtained by solving the connectivity-free version of the routing problem (see Chopra and Egerstedt (2012)), as initial estimates for finding a sub-optimal solution to the connectivity constrained routing problem. Moreover, the Connect sub-algorithm recursively moves each disconnected robot by a minimal distance, in order to merge it with a connected Fig.…”

“…Moreover, many applications require that requests be serviced in a synchronized and sequenced manner, thus motivating the need for spatio-temporal requests in lieu of spatial requests. This very topic is addressed in our previous work (see Chopra and Egerstedt (2012)), where we show that such a routing problem with spatio-temporal requests can be formulated as a pure assignment problem, with the resulting reduction in complexity.…”

Spatio-temporal multi-robot routing

“…Proof. We only provide the outline of the proof, due to space considerations (for the complete proof, see Chopra & Egerstedt, 2012b). In particular, we consider a bijective function ω r : As → Sc ′ such that ω r contains individual assignments between all timed positions in As and Sc ′ that have a corresponding diagonal cost entry in the cost matrixĈ .…”

Decentralized allocation of tasks with temporal and precedence constraints to a team of robots

“…Optimization objectives might require a quantity to be minimized, usually a cost [94,50,6] or regret [95,96], or to be maximized, usually a score [35,4] or a reward [97,75,27].…”

“…Minimizing the distance traveled is common (e.g. [99,94,100]) but some instead minimize a time measure over robot paths (e.g. [56,95]).…”