Repeated Auctions for Reallocation of Tasks with Pickup and Delivery upon Robot Failure

The task allocation problem with pickup and delivery is an extension of the widely studied multi-robot task allocation (MRTA) problem which, in general, considers each task as a single location to visit. Within the robotics domain distributed auctions are a popular method for task allocation [4]. In this work, we consider a team of autonomous mobile robots making deliveries in an office-like environment. Each robot has a set of tasks to complete, and each task is composed of a pickup location and a delivery location. The robots seek to complete their assigned tasks either minimising distance travelled or time taken according to a global team objective. During execution, individual robots may fail due to malfunctioning equipment or running low on battery power.