Design of efficiency function and multi-task allocation: emphasizing on water polo competition

This paper focuses on an ACO (Ant Colony Optimization)-based task allocation problem in multi-robot systems in order to optimize the global efficiency of robots and emphasizes the application to the water polo collection competition which is a typical item in the robotic fish competition. Firstly, we introduce the water polo collection competition including its characteristic and design kinds of efficiency functions for different robots according to their strategies. Secondly, combined with the research topic, an optimal allocation approach is proposed based on ACO algorithm after a definition of the optimized task allocation scheme. Moreover, the 2D simulation platform and the experimental platform are introduced respectively. And experiments on both platforms verify the effectiveness of our approach. At last, we conclude our researches and outline some future work.