Improved trade-based multi-robot coordination

Team work is essential to multiple mobile robot systems. An important question is, which robot should implement which action? In our previous work, we presented a trade-based task allocation approach for coordinated multi-robot exploration, which simulates the relationship between buyers and sellers in a business system, to achieve dynamic task allocation by using a mechanism of unsolicited bid. This paper still addresses the problem of coordinating multi-robot exploration while presents an improved trade-based approach to raise the efficiency of task allocation by using the Hungarian method. The proposed approach has been implemented and evaluated in simulation. The experimental results demonstrate the total exploration time can be significantly reduced by the improved trade-based approach compared to previous approaches.