An experimental study on leader-follower coalition method for solving multirobot task allocation problems

This paper presents the recent development of a leader-follower coalition based task allocation methodology. The resources required by task implementation are utilized in modeling both the robots and the tasks. The robots are required to work cooperatively in forming coalitions to accomplish the tasks. There are two types of constraints for task-imposed resource. One is the basic constraint to guarantee fundamental task ability for individual robots involved in the task. The other one is the additional constraint to ensure all robot coalitions to possess sufficient resources for successful task implementation. Design of leader selection, coalition forming and coalition evaluation algorithms are presented in the paper. Experiments are performed on a group of heterogeneous mobile robots to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.