Task Allocation Policy for UGV Systems using Colored Petri Nets

Unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) have been widely used in a number of applications including industrial automation, disaster relief, intelligent traffic, and military operation. The coordination system consisting of a group of mobile UGVs can expand perceptual scope as well as enhance operational performance in a complex environment. In this paper, we present an approach which plans a group of mobile UGVs to cooperatively finish some tasks, anyone of which can be described by demanding a certain quantity and type of mobile UGVs to a given location. The environment along with the different types of mobile UGVs is represented by a colored Petri net model. The sequence for serving the tasks and operating the transitions for the system can be obtained by settling an integer linear programming optimization. Finally, the entire process is simulated through an example by a linear programming software, i.e., LINGO.