Multi-Robot Dynamic Task Allocation Using Modified Ant Colony System

This paper presents a dynamic task allocation algorithm for multiple robots to visit multiple targets. This algorithm is specifically designed for the environment where robots have dissimilar starting and ending locations. And the constraint of balancing the number of targets visited by each robot is considered. More importantly, this paper takes into account the dynamicity of multi-robot system and the obstacles in the environment. This problem is modeled as a constrained MTSP which can not be transformed to TSP and can not be solved by classical Ant Colony System (ACS). The Modified Ant Colony System (MACS) is presented to solve this problem and the unvisited targets are allocated to appropriate robots dynamically. The simulation results show that the output of the proposed algorithm can satisfy the constraints and dynamicity for the problem of multi-robot task allocation.