Bid Intercession to Unlock Human Control in Decentralized Consensus-Based Multi-robot Task Allocation Algorithms

We investigate the introduction of novel intercession mechanisms in consensus-based decentralized task allocation within a heterogeneous multi-agent fleet. Intercession refers to the principle of agents biding on behalf of other agents or imposing certain allocations in decision-making architectures leveraging auction-based decision strategies. This is particularly relevant in settings where human operators, having more precise knowledge of the system situation, want to steer or force the multi-robot task allocation (MRTA). We thus extend an existing consensus framework, consensus-based auction algorithm (CBAA), while offering a simple generic method that operates independently of the underlying reasons, enabling interventions in a decentralized coordination process by humans at the agent and task levels. These interventions, whether systematic or occasional, have the added benefit of incurring minimal computational costs for field agents while maintaining the underlying algorithm's convergence and performance properties. We experimentally evaluate the proposed algorithm, I-CBAA, on synthetic MRTA scenarios implemented using the ROS framework.