An actor based architecture for multi-robot system with application to warehouse

Abstract

In this paper, we have presented a new architecture which allows humans and robots to work collaboratively in an environment. It is built on top of an actor model which uses a separate thread to process information of distinct entities like a human, robot or an algorithm. Because of the use of actor model, the system has advantages of both centralized and distributed systems. In contrast to existing architectures, the major advantage of the proposed system is its modularity and its ability to deal with problems like task allocation, task decomposition, collaboration and multi-robot pathfinding in a dynamic and reactive way. As a proof of concept, we have implemented this architecture with an auction-based algorithm for task allocation in an MRS and have presented the results.