Incremental mission allocation to a large team of robots

In the MARTHA project, a large number of robots in a harbour are given the global task of transporting containers from one area to another. The global decision-making process of allocating robots to those predefined tasks can be viewed as a scheduling and resource allocation problem, which is addres...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Vidal, T., Ghallab, M., Alami, R.
Format: Conference Proceeding
Language:English
Subjects:
Acoustic propagation
Airports
Boats
Containers
Decision making
Interleaved codes
Optimal scheduling
Propagation losses
Resource management
Robots
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Summary:In the MARTHA project, a large number of robots in a harbour are given the global task of transporting containers from one area to another. The global decision-making process of allocating robots to those predefined tasks can be viewed as a scheduling and resource allocation problem, which is addressed here in a centralised way. Imprecision of temporal constraints makes it meaningless to search for a strict optimal schedule. The authors' approach interleaves task allocation and execution, scheduling in a sliding short-term horizon, as the execution process runs, and providing near-optimal solutions. For large applications the complexity of temporal management is a crucial issue. The authors present a graph decomposition technique, leading to nearly-constant time temporal propagation, without any loss of information.
ISSN:1050-4729
2577-087X
DOI:10.1109/ROBOT.1996.506944