A Distributed Algorithm for Multi-Robot Task Allocation via Weighted Buffered Voronoi Partition

This paper proposes a distributed bundle al-gorithm for task allocation problems for multi-robot sys-tems. Specifically, in the developed formulation of the ve-hicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW), the robots are assigned to dispatch necessities for the sur-vivors. The utility of each robot is evaluated by the pref-erence index, which is composed of the distance cost and the task reward. Considering the requirements of the distributed structure and real-time computing, we pro-pose the weighted buffered Voronoi partition based bundle algorithm. The proposed algorithm iterates between the weighted buffered Voronoi partition and the bundle con-struction. The former divides the task area into several dis-joint partitions, and the latter ensures that the robot deter-mines the scheduling for tasks according to its preference. Finally, experiment results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.