Akshyakumar S. Puttewar
A.S. Chatpalliwar
Abstract
The capabilities and application areas of robotics have broaden with the development of information technology. Today, robotics is a rapidly growing field, as continuous research in the area of designing robots that serve various practical purposes, whether domestic, commercial and militarily. Multiple-robot systems provide several advantages over single-robot systems in terms of robustness, flexibility and efficiency. Multi- Robot Task Allocation (MRTA) deals with allocation of tasks to robots so as to accomplish the tasks in an optimal way. In this paper, a solution to the MRTA problem for both symmetric and asymmetric condition using Ant colony Optimization (ACO) algorithm is proposed. In order to assess the performance of ACO, some case problems are considered. These problems are also solved using Little's method which is very commonly used for task allocation. The performance of ACO is found better than Little's method in terms of accuracy of allocation, reliability of task allocation and cost associated.
Keywords- Ant Colony Optimization, Multi-Robot Task Allocation, multi-robots systems, symmetric condition, asymmetric condition, MATLAB