Accounting for Travel Time and Arrival Time Coordination During Task Allocations in Legged-Robot Teams

Shengqiang Chen, Yiyu Chen, Ronak Jain, Xiaopan Zhang, Quan Nguyen, Satyandra Gupta

Abstract: Many applications require the deployment of legged-robot teams to effectively and efficiently carry out missions. The use of multiple robots allows tasks to be executed concurrently, expediting mission completion. It also enhances resilience by enabling task transfer in case of a robot failure. This paper presents a formulation based on Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) for allocating tasks to robots by taking into account travel time and ensuring efficient execution of collaborative tasks. We extended the MILP formulation to account for complexities with legged robot teams. Our results demonstrate that this approach leads to improved performance in terms of the makespan of the mission. We demonstrate the usefulness of this approach using a case study involving the disinfection of a building consisting of multiple rooms.