Negotiating and Executing Composite Tasks for QoS-Aware Teams of Robots.

The problem of allocating tasks to a team of robots composing a complex activity with global performance constraints to be met, is NP-hard. Automated negotiation was proposed as a viable heuristic approach allowing for the dynamic adjustment of the performance levels provided by the single robots in the case of robots with limited resources. This approach leads to an improved exploitation of robots capabilities in terms of the number of composite activities that can be successfully allocated to the team. In the present work, the proposed approach is extended to include the possibility for the robots to negotiate for task allocation, and to execute the tasks in an interleaved way, so that the capabilities of the entire team can be better exploited, reducing the time the robots are inactive.