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Multi-robot Task Allocation: A Review of the State-of-the-Art

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Cooperative Robots and Sensor Networks 2015

Part of the book series: Studies in Computational Intelligence ((SCI,volume 604))

Abstract

Multi-robot systems (MRS) are a group of robots that are designed aiming to perform some collective behavior. By this collective behavior, some goals that are impossible for a single robot to achieve become feasible and attainable. There are several foreseen benefits of MRS compared to single robot systems such as the increased ability to resolve task complexity, increasing performance, reliability and simplicity in design. These benefits have attracted many researchers from academia and industry to investigate how to design and develop robust versatile MRS by solving a number of challenging problems such as complex task allocation, group formation, cooperative object detection and tracking, communication relaying and self-organization to name just a few. One of the most challenging problems of MRS is how to optimally assign a set of robots to a set of tasks in such a way that optimizes the overall system performance subject to a set of constraints. This problem is known as Multi-robot Task Allocation (MRTA) problem. MRTA is a complex problem especially when it comes to heterogeneous unreliable robots equipped with different capabilities that are required to perform various tasks with different requirements and constraints in an optimal way. This chapter provides a comprehensive review on challenging aspects of MRTA problem, recent approaches to tackle this problem and the future directions.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Engineering Science Department, Suez University Egypt and Vestec. Inc., 125 Northfield Drive West, Waterloo, N2L 6N8, Canada

    Alaa Khamis

  2. Intelligent Systems Lab (LSI) Research Group, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M), Av. de la Universidad 30, 28911, Madrid, Spain

    Ahmed Hussein

  3. Computers and Control Engineering Department, Tanta University, Egypt and Arab East Colleges, Abdalla Elsahmi Road, Elhada District, Riyadh, 11583, KSA

    Ahmed Elmogy

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  1. Alaa Khamis
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  2. Ahmed Hussein
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  3. Ahmed Elmogy
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Correspondence to Alaa Khamis .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. College of Computer and Information Sciences (CCIS), Prince Sultan University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and CISTER/INESC-TEC, ISEP, Polytechnic Institute of Porto, Porto, Portugal

    Anis Koubâa

  2. Depto. Ing. de Sistemas y Automática Escuela Superior de Ingenieros, University of Seville, Sevilla, Spain

    J.Ramiro Martínez-de Dios

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Khamis, A., Hussein, A., Elmogy, A. (2015). Multi-robot Task Allocation: A Review of the State-of-the-Art. In: Koubâa, A., Martínez-de Dios, J. (eds) Cooperative Robots and Sensor Networks 2015. Studies in Computational Intelligence, vol 604. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-18299-5_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-18299-5_2

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