Novel Approach for Distributed Task Allocation in Heterogeneous Teams

Real-world tasks are not only a series of sequential steps, but typically exhibit a combination of multiple types of constraints. These tasks pose significant challenges, as enumerating all the possible ways in which the task can be performed can lead to large representations and it is difficult to keep track of the task constraints during execution. We have developed an architecture that provides a compact encoding of tasks with complex constraints for collaborative multi-robot systems. The architecture allows for on-line, dynamic allocation of robots to steps of the task while ensuring the robots obey all of the task constraints. The architecture allows for opportunistic and flexible task execution given different environmental conditions.

Additionally, this architecture has been extended to incorporate heterogenous robot teams. A real-time distributed architecture enables collaborative execution of tasks with hierarchical representations and multiple types of execution constraints by teams of robots with variable heterogeneity. The architecture provides a novel pipeline that is able to handle automatic grasping of objects with unknown initial locations. This is motivated by the need for multiple robots to dynamically coordinate their execution during hierarchical tasks, in situations when the robots’ capabilities are not simply binary (skill exists: yes/no), but when the degree to which a skillcan be performed varies continuously based on the environmental conditions.

Role: Lead graduate researcher.

Associated Publications:

• In Preparation Conference Proceedings:
  • Janelle Blankenburg, Mariya Zagainova*, S. Pourya Hoseini A., Monica Nicolescu, Mircea Nicolesu, David Feil-Seifer. “Dynamic Task Allocation in Heterogeneous Robot Teams.” In International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Oct 2021 (in prep).
• Refereed Conference Proceedings
  • Janelle Blankenburg, Santosh Balajee Banisetty, Seyed P. Hoseini, Luke Fraser, David Feil-Seifer, Monica Nicolescu, and Mircea Nicolescu. “A Distributed Control Architecture for Collaborative Multi-Robot Task Allocation.” In International Conference on Humanoid Robots (Humanoids), Birmingham, UK, Nov 2017. https://jblankenburg.github.io/publication/2017-Humanoids