Assignment and navigation framework for multiple travelling robots

Abstract

Assignment Problem was well studied in the past 50 years, and is of great value in operations research and engineering. With the growing size of these problems and the new complexities introduced over the years, multi robot task assignment problems have become an important focus of assignment research. The work presented in this paper considers the scenario where multiple destination sites are available. The task of the controller is to assign a robot to each site as soon as possible in such a way so that robots can reach their destination with minimum travelling distance. Efficient algorithms for solving problem of this type have important applications in industries and home automation. Our main contributions are twofold: (a) A wave front based path planning method to compute the cost for the performance of each robot on each target (destination); and (b) An assignment algorithm for the assignment of robots to targets so that the sum of the total cost so obtained is as minimum as possible. The proposed approach has been tested through computer simulation. Experimental results demonstrate that our algorithm runs fast and produces near-optimal solutions on randomly generated instances. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.