Complex Tasks Allocation for Multi Robot Teams under Communication Constraints

The Multirobot Task Allocation (MRTA) paradigm is widely used in multirobot cooperation schemes, e.g. for observation, surveillance and tracking missions. Market-based approaches have yielded effective distributed solutions for such missions, showing the ability to manage heterogeneous, dynamic and robust robot teams. Two major challenges remain however poorly tackled: the management of inter-robot and inter-task communication constraints, and the use of a rich task formalism to model complex missions. This paper presents our investigations to treat these two aspects. The inter-robot and inter-task communication constraints are explicitly handled in the task allocation process, through simple geometric models and thanks to temporal scheduling skills. Rich tasks are allocated using a treebased task formalism that allows to treat complex missions with task ordering. Current work has shown it to be able to handle more complex tasks and to give better solution than MRTA systems working on simple task structures. In our work we will try to go further in this investigation.