Automatic aid for robot control system design

Abstract

With the rapid advancements in robotic technologies, the increasing diversity of hardware and software in robot systems has a significant impact on the design of robot control systems. The structure of robots becomes more and more sophisticated with the growing of the number of receptors and effectors. Integrating receptors and effectors to agents in multi-agent robotic system in order to complete a set of tasks is an important problem demanding efficient solution in the robot control system design. We present a bin-packing algorithm for task allocation and a graph nodes consolidation approach for resource allocation. Our bin-packing algorithm can allocate the tasks to each agent to meet the constraints of the computational ability of agents and the execution time of tasks, while guaranteeing all tasks can be completed. The graph nodes consolidation algorithm allocates all the resources to agents while minimizing the number of connections between agents, leading to a communication-efficient system structure. The proposed algorithms have polynomial time complexity compared with constrained guess-check and brutal force methods for solving complex multi-agent resource allocation problems.