Task allocation in robotic swarms: new methods and comparisons

Frederick Ducatelle, Alexander Förster, Gianni Di Caro, Luca Gambardella

Abstract

We study a situation where a swarm of robots is deployed to resolve multiple concurrent
tasks in a conned arena. The tasks are announced by dedicated robots at dierent locations
in the arena. Each task requires a certain number of robots to attend to it simultaneously. We
address the problem of task allocation: how can the robots of the swarm assign themselves
to one of the announced tasks in a distributed and ecient way? We propose two novel
methods: one relies on simple reactive mechanisms that are based on interaction through
light signals, while the other uses a more advanced gossip-based communication scheme to
announce task requirements among the robots. We evaluate both methods, and compare their
performance. We investigate specically the scalability and robustness of both methods, in
order to understand their relative usefulness in dierent swarm deployment conditions.