Multi-robot task allocation under uncertainty via hindsight optimization

Multi-robot systems are becoming increasingly prevalent in various real-world applications, such as manufacturing and warehouse logistics. These systems face complex challenges in 1) task allocation due to factors like time-extended tasks, and agent specialization, and 2) uncertainties in task execution. Potential task failures can add further contingency tasks to recover from the failure, thereby causing delays. This paper addresses the problem of Multi-Robot Task Allocation under Uncertainty by proposing a hierarchical approach that decouples the problem into two levels. We use a low-level optimization formulation to find the optimal solution for a deterministic multi-robot task allocation problem with known task outcomes. The higher-level search intelligently generates more likely combinations of failures and calls the inner-level search repeatedly to find the optimal task allocation sequence, given the known outcomes. We validate our results in simulation for a manufacturing domain and demonstrate that our method can reduce the effect of potential delays from contingencies. We show that our algorithm is computationally efficient while improving average makespan compared to other baselines.

2024 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)