Application of Artificial Capital Market in Task Allocation in Multi-robot Foraging

Abstract

Because of high speed, efficiency, robustness and flexibility of multi-agent systems, in recent years there has been an increasing interest in the art of these systems. Artificial market mechanisms are one of the well-known negotiation multi-agent protocols in multi-agent systems. In this paper artificial capital market as a new variant of market mechanism is introduced and employed in a multi-robot foraging problem. In this artificial capital market, the robots are going to benefit via investment on some assets, defined as doing foraging task. Each investment has a cost and an outcome. Limited initial capital of the investors constrains their investments. A negotiation protocol is proposed for decision making of the agents. Qualitative analysis reveals speed of convergence, near optimal solutions and robustness of the algorithm. Numerical analysis shows advantages of the proposed method over two previously developed heuristics in terms of four performance criteria.

Keywords:

• Task Allocation
• Foraging Robots
• Distributed Artificial Intelligence
• Multi-agent Systems
• Capital Market Mechanism