Title
Fast Near-Optimal Heterogeneous Task Allocation via Flow Decomposition
Abstract
Multi-robot systems are uniquely well-suited to performing complex tasks such as patrolling and tracking, information gathering, and pick-up and delivery problems, offering significantly higher performance than single-robot systems. A fundamental building block in most multi-robot systems is task allocation: assigning robots to tasks (e.g., patrolling an area, or servicing a transportation request) as they appear based on the robots' states to maximize reward. In many practical situations, the allocation must account for heterogeneous capabilities (e.g., availability of appropriate sensors or actuators) to ensure the feasibility of execution, and to promote a higher reward, over a long time horizon. To this end, we present the FLowDE c algorithm for efficient heterogeneous task-allocation, and show that it achieves an approximation factor of at least 1 /2 of the optimal reward. Our approach decomposes the heterogeneous problem into several homogeneous subproblems that can be solved efficiently using min-cost flow. Through simulation experiments, we show that our algorithm is faster by several orders of magnitude than a MILP approach.
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.1109/ICRA48506.2021.9560880
2021 IEEE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ROBOTICS AND AUTOMATION (ICRA 2021)
DocType
Volume
Issue
Conference
2021
1
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
1050-4729
0
0.34
References 
Authors
8
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Kiril Solovey17110.30
Saptarshi Bandyopadhyay29010.16
Federico Rossi300.68
Michael T. Wolf420.86
Marco Pavone558874.40