Auctioning robotic tasks with overlapping time windows

Abstract

This work investigates allocation of tasks to multi-robots when tasks are spatially distributed and constrained to be executed within assigned time windows. Our work explores the interaction between scheduling and optimal routing. We propose the Time-Sensitive Sequential Single-Item Auction algorithm as a method to allocate tasks with time windows in multi-robot systems. We show, experimentally, that the proposed algorithm outperforms other auction algorithms that we modified to handle time windows.