Dynamic Task Allocation for Heterogeneous Multi-Robot System under Communication Constraints

Multi-robot system has important application potential in disaster rescue and other dangerous scenarios, in which task allocation is the basis for multi-robot cooperation to complete tasks. Due to the limited ability of individual robots, many complex scenarios requires coordination of different types of robot, e.g. robots for search, communication, rescue and so on. At the same time, communication is often limited in a wide range of scenarios. This brings two challenges in the realistic environment: heterogeneous multi-robot cooperation problem and communication constraint problem. This paper proposes a task allocation method based on hierarchical auction and dynamic grouping. By introducing a dynamic grouping algorithm to the general allocation procedure, we simultaneously optimize the number of robots in each group and the communication distance between robots. Then the communication loss rate can be reduced to improve task execution efficiency. Simulations of a communication constrained search and rescue scenario are conducted to verify the proposed algorithm, which are compared with the vanilla auction algorithm and a hierarchical approach on static grouping. The results show that our method surpasses the baseline on both task achievement and communication performance.