Decentralized dynamic task allocation for UAVs with limited communication range

[EN]We present the Limited-range Online Routing Problem (LORP), which involves a team of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) with limited communication range that must autonomously coordinate to service task requests. We first show a general approach to cast this dynamic problem as a sequence of decentr...

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Detalhes bibliográficos
Autores: Pujol-Gonzalez, Marc, Cerquides, Jesús, Meseguer, Pedro, Rodríguez-Aguilar, Juan Antonio, Tambe, Milind
Tipo de documento: artigo
Estado:Versión enviada para evaluación y publicación
Data de publicação:2018
País:España
Recursos:Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC)
Repositório:DIGITAL.CSIC. Repositorio Institucional del CSIC
OAI Identifier:oai:digital.csic.es:10261/240289
Acesso em linha:http://hdl.handle.net/10261/240289
Access Level:Acceso aberto
Palavra-chave:Task allocation
unmanned serial vehicles
max-sum
Decentralised
Descrição
Resumo:[EN]We present the Limited-range Online Routing Problem (LORP), which involves a team of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) with limited communication range that must autonomously coordinate to service task requests. We first show a general approach to cast this dynamic problem as a sequence of decentralized task allocation problems. Then we present two solutions both based on modeling the allocation task as a Markov Random Field to subsequently assess decisions by means of the decentralized Max-Sum algorithm. Our first solution assumes independence between requests, whereas our second solution also considers the UAVs’ workloads. A thorough empirical evaluation shows that our workloadbased solution consistently outperforms current state-of-the-art methods in a wide range of scenarios, lowering the average service time up to 16%. In the bestcase scenario there is no gap between our decentralized solution and centralized techniques. In the worst-case scenario we manage to reduce by 25% the gap between current decentralized and centralized techniques. Thus, our solution becomes the method of choice for our problem.