Gini Coefficient-based Task Allocation for Multi-robot Systems With Limited Energy Resources  

作　　者：Danfeng Wu Guangping Zeng Lingguo Meng Weijian Zhou Linmin Li 

机构地区：[1]School of Software, Liaoning Technical University, Huludao 125105, China [2]School of Computer and Communication Engineering, University of Science and Technology Beijing, Beijing 100083, China

出　　处：《IEEE/CAA Journal of Automatica Sinica》2018年第1期155-168,共14页自动化学报（英文版）

基　　金：supported by the National High Technology Research and Development Program of China(863 Program)(2015AA015403);the National Natural Science Foundation of China(61404069,61401185);the Project of Education Department of Liaoning Province(LJYL052)

摘　　要：Nowadays, robots generally have a variety of capabilities, which often form a coalition replacing human to work in dangerous environment, such as rescue, exploration, etc. In these operating conditions, the energy supply of robots usually cannot be guaranteed. If the energy resources of some robots are consumed too fast, the number of the future tasks of the coalition will be affected. This paper will develop a novel task allocation method based on Gini coefficient to make full use of limited energy resources of multi-robot system to maximize the number of tasks. At the same time, considering resources consumption,we incorporate the market-based allocation mechanism into our Gini coefficient-based method and propose a hybrid method,which can flexibly optimize the task completion number and the resource consumption according to the application contexts.Experiments show that the multi-robot system with limited energy resources can accomplish more tasks by the proposed Gini coefficient-based method, and the hybrid method can be dynamically adaptive to changes of the work environment and realize the dual optimization goals.Nowadays, robots generally have a variety of capabilities, which often form a coalition replacing human to work in dangerous environment, such as rescue, exploration, etc. In these operating conditions, the energy supply of robots usually cannot be guaranteed. If the energy resources of some robots are consumed too fast, the number of the future tasks of the coalition will be affected. This paper will develop a novel task allocation method based on Gini coefficient to make full use of limited energy resources of multi-robot system to maximize the number of tasks. At the same time, considering resources consumption,we incorporate the market-based allocation mechanism into our Gini coefficient-based method and propose a hybrid method,which can flexibly optimize the task completion number and the resource consumption according to the application contexts.Experiments show that the multi-robot system with limited energy resources can accomplish more tasks by the proposed Gini coefficient-based method, and the hybrid method can be dynamically adaptive to changes of the work environment and realize the dual optimization goals.

关 键 词：Energy resource constraints Gini coefficient multi-robot systems task allocation 

分 类 号：TP[自动化与计算机技术]