Performance of Collaborative Multi Robots: Communication and Task Allocation

Collaboration and coordination among multi robots in industrial environments and unknown environment such as risk, disastrous area presents an exciting opportunity in manufacturing and production processes as well as emergency and rescue activities. Coordination and collaboration involves effective communication among robots and efficient task allocation and performance. In this paper, we have proposed architecture and developed algorithm for effective communication and task management. Through performance analysis, we showed the error and task completion time as a function of number of robots. We have also presented coordination overhead when number of robots is more. It is found that there is decrease in task completion time as number of robots increases, which is obvious however, the rate of decrease is lesser as the number of robots increases. It is also found that the coordination overhead increases so as the error; almost linearly with the number of robots. Thus, a trade-off between scaling up robots and managing the higher error rate must be maintained. The investigation is expected to be very useful in automation of production, logistic, agriculture and other industry.