Communication-Preserving Bids in Market-Based Task Allocation

Abstract

In this paper, we study the effects of impaired communications on the performances of auction-based task allocation in a dynamic surveillance scenario. We propose a novel connectivity term to include in the bid valuation formula, that aims at improving communications in the multi-robot team. We evaluate our method as well as another state-of-the-art method using robot inter-distance to maintain communication, on randomly generated scenarios and on a real-world scenario. We demonstrate that including our connectivity term in the bid valuation formula improves the performances of the auction scheme.