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Event- and time-triggered dynamic task assignments for multiple vehicles

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Abstract

We study the dynamic task assignment problem in which multiple dispersed vehicles are employed to visit a set of targets. Some targets’ locations are initially known and the others are dynamically randomly generated during a finite time horizon. The objective is to visit all the target locations while trying to minimize the vehicles’ total travel time. Based on existing algorithms used to deal with static multi-vehicle task assignment, two types of dynamic task assignments, namely event-triggered and time-triggered, are studied to investigate what the appropriate time instants should be to change in real time the assignment of the target locations in response to the newly generated target locations. Furthermore, for both the event- and time-triggered assignments, we propose several algorithms to investigate how to distribute the newly generated target locations to the vehicles. Extensive numerical simulations are carried out which show better performance of the event-triggered task assignment algorithms over the time-triggered algorithms under different arrival rates of the newly generated target locations.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by the European Research Council (Grant No. ERC-StG-307207), and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 61633002).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Mechatronics and Control Engineering, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, 518060, China

    Xiaoshan Bai

  2. Faculty of Science and Engineering, University of Groningen, 9747 AG, Groningen, The Netherlands

    Xiaoshan Bai & Ming Cao

  3. School of Marine Science and Technology, Northwestern Polytechnical University, 127 West Youyi Road, Xi’an, 710072, China

    Xiaoshan Bai & Weisheng Yan

Authors
  1. Xiaoshan Bai
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  2. Ming Cao
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  3. Weisheng Yan
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Correspondence to Xiaoshan Bai.

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This is one of the several papers published in Autonomous Robots comprising the Special Issue on Multi-Robot and Multi-Agent Systems.

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Bai, X., Cao, M. & Yan, W. Event- and time-triggered dynamic task assignments for multiple vehicles. Auton Robot 44, 877–888 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10514-020-09912-1

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