RELIABILITY-BASED MULTI-ROBOT ROUTE PLANNING

Multi-robot route planning (MRRP) is required in many applications of autonomous robots. In the literature, different performance metrics such as time, distance, and energy were proposed for route planning of multi-robot teams. These metrics are essential for efficient operation of multi-robot team. Besides, reliability is very important for reducing risk of failures during any mission. Robot failure is an undesired event for long-term autonomous operation of the robot team. Reliability metric can be used in MRRP to forecast the risk even before it occurs and so it defines novel proactive strategy for sustainability of multi-robot team autonomy. In this study, reliability-based MRRP method is proposed. The proposed approach consists of two algorithms that are route set construction (RSC) and route set analysis and selection (RAS). The RSC algorithm is responsible for constructing route sets for any specific mission. The RAS algorithm analyses route sets considering reliability values of robots and calculates probability of route completion (PoRC) for each route in the set. Then, the most reliable route is selected as the one with the highest PoRC value. The proposed approach is applied to the MRRP problem to show the effect of the robot reliabilities on planned routes. To the best of author's knowledge, this article is among the first few articles on MRRP considering reliability of the robots.