Task allocation for reconfigurable teams

• Methods for teams of self-reconfigurable robots to divide and merge to complete missions.
• Behavior-based approach and auction-based approach extend traditional robot team methods.
• Exploration and surveillance sensor placement missions considered.
• Simulator enables comparative testing of both algorithms performing both missions.

Self-reconfigurable robots are systems built from a collection of modules that have the ability to form themselves into many different topologies. This includes forming robots of different shapes, but also includes dividing and merging to form different numbers of physically independent robots during the course of the mission. We call systems of this type reconfigurable teams. The challenge with such systems is to utilize these capabilities in an effective fashion to complete the given mission. In this work, we describe a behavior-based algorithm and an auction-based algorithm, each inspired by previous work in mobile robot task allocation, to control reconfigurable teams. For each technique, we extend the traditional methods by giving them the ability to utilize the dividing and merging operations to improve efficiency of the overall mission. We then apply these algorithms to missions of exploration and placement of surveillance sensors, showing that both techniques successfully avail themselves of the reconfigurations in an efficient and effective manner.