Cooperative task assignment for multiple vehicles

Multi-vehicle systems have been increasingly exploited to accomplish difficult and complex missions, where effective and efficient coordinations of the vehicles can greatly improve the team's performance. Motivated by need from practice, we study the multi-vehicle task assignment in various challenging environments. We first investigate the task assignment for multiple vehicles in a time-invariant drift field. The objective is to employ the vehicles to visit a set of target locations in the drift field while trying to minimize the vehicles' total travel time. Using optimal control theory, a path planning algorithm is designed to generate the time-optimal path for a vehicle to travel between any two prescribed locations in a drift field. The path planning algorithm provides the cost matrix for the target assignment, and generates routes once the target locations are assigned to the vehicles. Using tools from graph theory, a lower bound on the optimal solution is found, which can be used to measure the proximity of a solution from the optimal. We propose several clustering-based task assignment algorithms in which two of them guarantee that all the target locations will be visited within a computable maximal travel time, which is at most twice of the optimal when the cost matrix is symmetric. In addition, we extend the multi-vehicle task assignment study in a time-invariant drift field with obstacles. The vehicles have different capabilities, and each kind of vehicles need to visit a certain type of target locations; each target location might have the demand to be visited more than once by different kinds of vehicles. A path planning method has been designed to enable the vehicles to move between two prescribed locations in a drift field with the minimal time while avoiding obstacles. This task assignment problem is shown to be NP-hard, and a distributed task assignment algorithm has been designed, which can achieve near-optimal solutions to the task assignment problem. Furthermore, we study the task assignment problem in which multiple dispersed heterogeneous vehicles with limited communication range need to visit a set of target locations while trying to minimize the vehicles' total travel distance. Each vehicle initially has the position information of all the targets and of those vehicles that are within its limited communication range, and each target demands a vehicle with some specified capability to visit it. We design a decentralized auction algorithm which first employs an information consensus procedure to merge the local information carried by each communication-connected vehicle subnetwork. Then, the algorithm constructs conflict-free target assignments for the communication-connected vehicles, and guarantees that the total travel distance of the vehicles is at most twice of the optimal when the communication network is initially connected. In the end we exploit the precedence-constrained task assignment problem for a truck and a micro drone to deliver packages to a set of dispersed customers subject to precedence constraints that specify which customers need to be visited before which other customers. The truck is restricted to travel in a street network and the micro drone, restricted by its loading capacity and operation range, can fly from the truck to perform the last mile package deliveries. The objective is to minimize the time to serve all the customers respecting every precedence constraint. The problem is shown to be NP-hard, and a lower bound on the optimal time to serve all the customers is constructed by using tools from graph theory. Integrating with a topological sorting technique, several heuristic task assignment algorithms are constructed to solve the task assignment problem

Event- and time-triggered dynamic task assignments for multiple vehicles:Special Issue on Multi-Robot and Multi-Agent Systems

We study the dynamic task assignment problem in which multiple dispersed vehicles are employed to visit a set of targets. Some targets’ locations are initially known and the others are dynamically randomly generated during a finite time horizon. The objective is to visit all the target locations while trying to minimize the vehicles’ total travel time. Based on existing algorithms used to deal with static multi-vehicle task assignment, two types of dynamic task assignments, namely event-triggered and time-triggered, are studied to investigate what the appropriate time instants should be to change in real time the assignment of the target locations in response to the newly generated target locations. Furthermore, for both the event- and time-triggered assignments, we propose several algorithms to investigate how to distribute the newly generated target locations to the vehicles. Extensive numerical simulations are carried out which show better performance of the event-triggered task assignment algorithms over the time-triggered algorithms under different arrival rates of the newly generated target locations

Distributed multi-vehicle task assignment in a time-invariant drift field with obstacles

This study investigates the task assignment problem where a fleet of dispersed vehicles needs to visit multiple target locations in a time-invariant drift field with obstacles while trying to minimise the vehicles' total travel time. The vehicles have different capabilities, and each kind of vehicles can visit a certain type of the target locations; each target location might require to be visited more than once by different kinds of vehicles. The task assignment problem has been proven to be NP-hard. A path planning algorithm is first designed to minimise the time for a vehicle to travel between two given locations through the drift field while avoiding any obstacle. The path planning algorithm provides the travel cost matrix for the target assignment, and generates routes once the target locations are assigned to the vehicles. Then, a distributed algorithm is proposed to assign the target locations to the vehicles using only local communication. The algorithm guarantees that all the visiting demands of every target will be satisfied within a total travel time that is at worst twice of the optimal when the travel cost matrix is symmetric. Numerical simulations show that the algorithm can lead to solutions close to the optimal

An integrated multi-population genetic algorithm for multi-vehicle task assignment in a drift field

This paper investigates the task assignment problem for a team of autonomous aerial/marine vehicles driven by constant thrust and maneuvering in a planar lateral drift field. The aim is to minimize the total traveling time in order to guide the vehicles to deliver a number of customized sensors to a set of target points with different sensor demands in the drift field. To solve the problem, we consider together navigation strategies and target assignment algorithms; the former minimizes the traveling time between two given locations in the drift field and the latter allocates a sequence of target locations to each vehicle. We first consider the effect of the weight of the carried sensors on the speed of each vehicle, and construct a sufficient condition to guarantee that the whole operation environment is reachable for the vehicles. Then from optimal control principles, time-optimal path planning is carried out to navigate each vehicle from an initial position to its given target location. Most importantly, to assign the targets to the vehicles, we combine the virtual coding strategy, multiple offspring method, intermarriage crossover strategy, and the tabu search mechanism to obtain a co-evolutionary multi-population genetic algorithm, short-named CMGA. Simulations on sensor delivery scenarios in both fixed and time-varying drift fields are shown to highlight the satisfying performances of the proposed approach against popular greedy algorithms

Efficient Heuristic Algorithms for Single-Vehicle Task Planning With Precedence Constraints

This article investigates the task planning problem where one vehicle needs to visit a set of target locations while respecting the precedence constraints that specify the sequence orders to visit the targets. The objective is to minimize the vehicle’s total travel distance to visit all the targets while satisfying all the precedence constraints. We show that the optimization problem is NP-hard, and consequently, to measure the proximity of a suboptimal solution from the optimal, a lower bound on the optimal solution is constructed based on the graph theory. Then, inspired by the existing topological sorting techniques, a new topological sorting strategy is proposed; in addition, facilitated by the sorting, we propose several heuristic algorithms to solve the task planning problem. The numerical experiments show that the designed algorithms can quickly lead to satisfying solutions and have better performance in comparison with popular genetic algorithms

Efficient Routing for Precedence-Constrained Package Delivery for Heterogeneous Vehicles

This paper studies the precedence-constrained task assignment problem for a team of heterogeneous vehicles to deliver packages to a set of dispersed customers subject to precedence constraints that specify which customers need to be visited before which other customers. A truck and a micro drone with complementary capabilities are employed where the truck is restricted to travel in a street network and the micro drone, restricted by its loading capacity and operation range, can fly from the truck to perform the last-mile package deliveries. The objective is to minimize the time to serve all the customers respecting every precedence constraint. The problem is shown to be NP-hard, and a lower bound on the optimal time to serve all the customers is constructed by using tools from graph theory. Then, integrating with a topological sorting technique, several heuristic task assignment algorithms are proposed to solve the task assignment problem. Numerical simulations show the superior performances of the proposed algorithms compared with popular genetic algorithms. Note to Practitioners - This paper presents several task assignment algorithms for the precedence-constrained package delivery for the team of a truck and a micro drone. The truck can carry the drone moving in a street network, while the drone completes the last-mile package deliveries. The practical contributions of this paper are fourfold. First, the precedence constraints on the ordering of the customers to be served are considered, which enables complex logistic scheduling for customers prioritized according to their urgency or importance. Second, the package delivery optimization problem is shown to be NP-hard, which clearly shows the need for creative approximation algorithms to solve the problem. Third, the constructed lower bound on the optimal time to serve all the customers helps to clarify for practitioners the limiting performance of a feasible solution. Fourth, the proposed task assignment algorithms are efficient and can be adapted for real scenarios

Clustering-based algorithms for multi-vehicle task assignment in a time-invariant drift field

This paper studies the multi-vehicle task assignment problem where several dispersed vehicles need to visit a set of target locations in a time-invariant drift field while trying to minimize the total travel time. Using optimal control theory, we first design a path planning algorithm to minimize the time for each vehicle to travel between two given locations in the drift field. The path planning algorithm provides the cost matrix for the target assignment, and generates routes once the target locations are assigned to a vehicle. Then, we propose several clustering strategies to assign the targets, and we use two metrics to determine the visiting sequence of the targets clustered to each vehicle. Mainly used to specify the minimum time for a vehicle to travel between any two target locations, the cost matrix is obtained using the path planning algorithm, and is in general asymmetric due to time-invariant currents of the drift field. We show that one of the clustering strategies can obtain a min-cost arborescence of the asymmetric target vehicle graph where the weight of a directed edge between two vertices is the minimum travel time from one vertex to the other respecting the orientation. Using tools from graph theory, a lower bound on the optimal solution is found, which can be used to measure the proximity of a solution from the optimal. Furthermore, by integrating the target clustering strategies with the target visiting metrics, we obtain several task assignment algorithms. Among them, two algorithms guarantee that all the target locations will be visited within a computable maximal travel time, which is at most twice of the optimal when the cost matrix is symmetric. Finally, numerical simulations show that the algorithms can quickly lead to a solution that is close to the optimal

The linkages between stomatal physiological traits and rapid expansion of exotic mangrove species (Laguncularia racemosa) in new territories

The fast-growing exotic mangrove species (Laguncularia racemosa) has been widely introduced in new territories such as China to restore mangrove ecosystems. However, the invasiveness, as well as the mechanisms for the rapid expansion after the introduction are still not well studied. Here, we try to reveal possible micro-mechanisms for the fast expansion of L. racemosa, using the data on leaf stomata straits, gas-exchange parameters, stable isotope ratios, carbon-nitrogen allocation from L. racemosa and the adjacent native mangroves (Avicennia marina, Aegiceras corniculatum, Bruguiera gymnorhiza, Kandelia obovata) in Hainan Island, China. We found that the higher density but smaller size stoma of L. racemosa enhanced stomatal conductance and shorten the diffusion path of carbon dioxide, thereby increasing the photosynthetic rate. Moreover, the higher stomatal density of L. racemosa exerts a significant positive effect on transpiration, which thus accelerated the water transport and nutrient uptake to meet the advanced need for nutrients and water for fast-growing. The evidence from leaf δ13C and carbon-nitrogen allocation further proved that L. racemosa has a lower intrinsic water use efficiency but a higher rate of photosynthesis than native mangrove species. Our results suggest that stomatal morphological and physiological traits could strongly influence the growth of L. racemosa compared to the adjacent native mangroves, which provides a new perspective for the fast expansion of exotic mangrove species in China. These findings also suggest that L. racemosa has an invasive potential in native mangrove habitats, thereby the mangrove reforestation projects by introducing L. racemosa should be treated with caution