Emergent Task Allocation for Mobile Robots Through Intentions and Directives

Multi-robot systems require efficient and accurate planning in order to perform mission-critical tasks. However, algorithms that find the optimal solution are usually computationally expensive and may require a large number of messages between the robots as the robots need to be aware of the global spatiotemporal information. In this paper, the authors introduce an emergent task allocation approach for mobile robots. Each robot uses only the information obtained from its immediate neighbors in its decision. Their technique is general enough to be applicable to any task allocation scheme as long as a utilization criterion is given.