Research Of Multi-robot Task Allocation Based On Ant Colony Algorithm

With the rapid development of intelligent technology and the robot system, the application of multi-robot system is increasingly widespread. The task allocation problem is a typical combinatorial optimization problem. The research about the optimal task allocation on multi-processor system is a hotspot problem of making use of system resources to solve practical problem effectively. In theory, the task allocation problem is a recognized NP-hard problem, so how to construct effective heuristic or approximate algorithm is an important domain of research until now.The research of multi-robot task allocation is an important field of multi-robot system,and regional coverage of multi-robot can be understood as multi-robot task allocation, which has a broad application prospect, such as robot for cleaning, exploitation of marine resources,and the rescue. The increasing of robots and tasks in multi-robot systems makes task allocation more complex.Intelligent algorithm, which has strong robustness and parallelism,can solve the multi-objective assignment efficiently. This paper discusses the multi-robot task allocation and the regional coverage of the multi-robot in unknown environment respectively,and puts forward the solutions based on ant colony algorithm.Ant colony algorithm is an intelligent algorithm of imitating ant foraging, and is widely used in different kinds of combinatorial optimization. In the task allocation, the probabilistic search strategy is used to realize the multi-robot task allocation. The environment based on grid map of the environment is used to area coverage of the multi-robot. In order to achieve practical results, this paper simulates three different environments in real situation: no obstacle environment, a random obstacle environment and a relatively regular office environment. In order to reduce the number of robot covered duplication and prevent infinite loop repeat coverage of the robot.This paper improves the strategy of probability search, so as to avoid deadlock phenomenon of tasks and to improve the efficiency of multi-robot task. Finally, this paper verifies the correctness and feasibility of the algorithm by Matlab simulation software and simulation experiments.