A Distributed Bidirectional Auction Algorithm for Multirobot Coordination

Multi-robot coordination is fundamental and significant in the robotics research community. With the increasing number of robots in one task, team efficiency improvement and energy consumption reduction research becomes more important in robots coordination. In this paper, we propose a novel multirobot coordination algorithm called Distributed Bidirectional Auction algorithm, in which robots bid for task and the task assignment is decided by both the auctioneer and bidder so that the task is completed through a more efficient coordination. We verify our algorithm through simulator on a large swarm of mobile robots in pattern formation scenario, which showed the approach improved team efficiency with robots increased. By comparison with traditional distributed auction algorithm and random allocation algorithm, it also performs better in energy consumption reduction.