Abstract
Multi-Robot Task Allocation (MRTA) will gain much importance by the rise of autonomous vehicles and the Internet of Things (IoT) where several agents coordinate and work for a common goal. Due to their distributed nature, hardware complexity and environmental constraints, constructing and testing multi-robot systems may be expensive, dangerous and time-consuming. MRTA includes sub-problems such as coordination strategy, bid valuation, path planning, terrain complexity, robot design, path optimization, and overall optimization. There is a need for building a generic MRTA model to experiment with these numerous combinations in a controlled and automated fashion. This paper presents the structure of the MRTA generic simulation model which is designed to search for the optimal combination of MRTA taxonomy elements. An MRTA Simulation Tool (MRTASim) is designed to adapt the generic model to specific cases and to run simulations for real-life scenarios. Decision-makers can build their own MRTA models and they can be sure for the feasibility of large distributed and collaborated systems before initiating huge investments.
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TUBITAK in Turkish) for funding this study, Clifton G.M. Presser, Rene Grothmann and William Fiset for sharing their TSP Java code, Konstantinos A. Nedas for sharing his Hungarian Algorithm Java code, and Daniel Beard for sharing his DStarLite Java Pathfinding code.
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Öztürk, S., Kuzucuoğlu, A.E. (2020). Building a Generic Simulation Model for Analyzing the Feasibility of Multi-Robot Task Allocation (MRTA) Problems. In: Mazal, J., Fagiolini, A., Vasik, P. (eds) Modelling and Simulation for Autonomous Systems. MESAS 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11995. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43890-6_6
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