Decentralized allocation of tasks with temporal and precedence constraints to a team of robots

Abstract

We propose an auction-based method for a team of robots to allocate and execute tasks that have temporal and precedence constraints. The robots use our priority-based iterated sequential single-item auction algorithm to allocate tasks among themselves and keep track of their individual schedules. The key idea is to decouple precedence constraints from temporal constraints and deal with them separately. In this paper we demonstrate how the allocation scheme can be extended to handle failures and delays during task execution. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in simulation and with real robot experiments.