Energy-balanced matching and sequence dispatch of robots to events: Pairwise exchanges and sensor assisted robot coordination

Abstract

Given a set of events and a set of robots, the dispatch problem is to allocate one robot for each event to visit it. In a single round, each robot may be allowed to visit only one event (matching dispatch), or several events in a sequence (sequence dispatch problem). The distributed version of the problem is embedded into a sensor network field, where each event is discovered by a sensor and reported to a robot. Existing centralized and distributed solution based on stable marriage problem suffers from the presence of long robot paths. The other existing solution, based on k-means clustering and traveling salesman tour, suffers from the design goal of allocating the same number of events to each robot. We propose pair wise distance based matching (PDM) algorithm, to eliminate long matching edges by pair wise exchanges among two robot-event pairs to reduce overall path length. Our sequence dispatch (SQD) algorithm finds the closest robot for each free event, and, iteratively, selects closest event-robot pair while moving selected robot to the new position and updating other distances to reflect that new position. When event-robot distances are multiplied by robot resistance (inverse of the remaining energy), the corresponding energy-balanced variants are obtained. Our localized algorithm (MAD) is based on information mesh infrastructure for finding nearby robot, and local auctions in robot network to perhaps find a better one. © 2013 IEEE.