Task allocation with executable coalitions in multirobot tasks

In our prior work, we proposed the IQ-ASyMTRe architecture with a measure of information quality to reason about forming coalitions in multirobot tasks. The formed coalitions are guaranteed to be executable, given the current configurations of the robots and environment. A cost and a quality measure are associated with each coalition to further determine its utility for the task. In this paper, we show that IQ-ASyMTRe-like architectures can be utilized to significantly reduce the overall complexity of task allocation by considering only executable coalitions. For implementation, we apply a layering technique such that most existing methods for task allocation can be easily incorporated. Furthermore, we introduce a general process to address situations in which no executable coalitions are available for certain tasks, and integrate it with IQ-ASyMTRe to achieve more autonomy. Such an approach is able to autonomously decompose unsatisfied preconditions of the required task behaviors into satisfiable components, in order to generate partial order plans for them accordingly. We show how this process can be implemented using a market-based approach. Simulation results are provided to demonstrate these techniques.