A new multi-robot task allocation algorithm based on multi-modality synthesis

In distributed task allocation, it is hard to balance three problems: conflict, solution quality and solving price. Multimodal synthesis method is put forward for multi-robot distributed and self-organized task allocation. Three models of cooperation mechanism are combined; these three models are conflict problem, which is implicit cooperation mechanism based on pheromone, implicit task allocation realized by threshold method based on robot visual sense, and explicit task allocation based on improved contract net mechanism. The experiment results and their analysis show preliminarily that multimodal synthesis method can expand the scope of the robot perception, improve the system reliability, resolve the conflict problem by less communication, and improve the task execution efficiency.