A Framework for Multi-Robot Coalition Formation

Task allocation is a fundamental problem that any multirobot system must address. Numerous multi-robot task allocation schemes have been proposed over the past decade. A vast majority of these schemes address the problem of assigning a single robot to each task. However as the complexity of multi-robot tasks increases, often situations arise where multiple robot teams need to be assigned to a set of tasks. This problem, also known as the coalition formation problem has received relatively little attention in the multi-robot community. This paper provides a generic, task independent framework for solutions to this problem for a variety task environments. In particular, the paper introduces RACHNA, a novel auction based coalition formation system for dynamic task environments. This is an extension to our previous work which proposed a static multi-robot coalition formation algorithm based on a popular heuristic from the Distributed Artificial Intelligence