Technical Lecture Program on Task Allocation using a Team of Robots

Abstract of the talk: Task allocation in a multi-robot system is required to determine which robots should execute which tasks, in order to achieve the overall system goals. Task allocation is an important aspect of many multi-robot systems, which ensures coordinated team behaviour. In this talk, we describe the features and complexity of multi-robot task allocation (MRTA) problems, which are determined by the requirements of the particular domain. We illustrate how to classify these problems in a systematic manner and show some real-life applications. We show a very general formulation of the task allocation problem that generalizes several versions that are well-studied in the existing literature. Our formulation includes the states of robots, tasks, and the surrounding environment in which they operate. We describe how the problem can be varied depending on the feasibility constraints, objective functions, and the level of dynamically changing information. We illustrate an algorithm to solve a particular variant of the MRTA problem and show how this algorithm performs better than current state-of-the-art algorithms on real datasets. We conclude the talk with some directions for future research.
Co-sponsored by: CSE Department, Jadavpur University
Speaker(s): Arindam Pal
Bldg: Computer Science and Engineering, Amitava Dey Memorial Hall, Jadavpur University, KOLKATA, West Bengal, India, 700032