Review on state-of-the-art dynamic task allocation strategies for multiple-robot systems

TLDR

This review summarizes state‑of‑the‑art dynamic task allocation strategies for multi‑robot systems, highlights key research directions, and discusses applications to exploration problems. The authors survey and qualitatively compare dynamic task allocation methods, examining application contexts, constraints, objective functions, and uncertainty handling, while outlining challenges and future research directions. The review evaluates strategies on objective functions, robustness, allocation and completion times, and reallocation capabilities, recommending suitable real‑world applications and pinpointing unresolved challenges.

Abstract

Purpose This paper aims to present a concise review on the variant state-of-the-art dynamic task allocation strategies. It presents a thorough discussion about the existing dynamic task allocation strategies mainly with respect to the problem application, constraints, objective functions and uncertainty handling methods. Design/methodology/approach This paper briefs the introduction of multi-robot dynamic task allocation problem and discloses the challenges that exist in real-world dynamic task allocation problems. Numerous task allocation strategies are discussed in this paper, and it establishes the characteristics features between them in a qualitative manner. This paper also exhibits the existing research gaps and conducive future research directions in dynamic task allocation for multiple mobile robot systems. Findings This paper concerns the objective functions, robustness, task allocation time, completion time, and task reallocation feature for performance analysis of different task allocation strategies. It prescribes suitable real-world applications for variant task allocation strategies and identifies the challenges to be resolved in multi-robot task allocation strategies. Originality/value This paper provides a comprehensive review of dynamic task allocation strategies and incites the salient research directions to the researchers in multi-robot dynamic task allocation problems. This paper aims to summarize the latest approaches in the application of exploration problems.