A Behavior Based Architecture with Auction-Based Task Assignment for Multi-robot Industrial Applications

The study of collective robotic systems and how the interaction of the units that make them up can be harnessed to perform useful tasks is one of the main research topics in autonomous robotics. Inspiration for solutions in this realm can be sought in nature and in the interaction of natural social systems whether through simple trading strategies or through more complex economic models. Here we present a three level behavior based architecture for the implementation of multi-robot based cooperation systems that is based on the individual, the collective and the social levels. In particular, here we are going to consider the application of this architecture for the implementation and study of auction-based strategies for assigning tasks in a real application of multi-robot systems. Our approach is more focused on studying the behavior of auction-based techniques from an engineering point of view in terms of parameters and results analysis. To this end, we have used a real industrial case as an experimental platform where a heterogeneous group of robots must clean a ship tank. The results obtained show how the performance of the auction mechanism we have implemented does not degrade in terms of computational cost when the number of robots is increased, and how the complexity of the task assignment can be highly increased without any change in the cooperative control system.