An integrated decision-making framework of a heterogeneous aerial robotic swarm for cooperative tasks with minimum requirements:

Given a cooperative mission consisting of multiple tasks spatially distributed, an aerial robotic swarm’s decision-making issues include team formation, team-to-task assignment, agent-to-work-position assignment and trajectory optimisation with collision avoidance. The problem becomes even more complicated when involving heterogeneous agents, tasks’ minimum requirements and fair allocation. This paper formulates all the combined issues as an optimisation problem and then proposes an integrated framework that addresses the problem in a decentralised fashion. We approximate and decouple the complex original problem into three subproblems (i.e. coalition formation, position allocation and path planning), which are sequentially addressed by three different proposed modules. The coalition formation module based on game theories deals with a max-min problem, the objective of which is to partition the agents into disjoint task-specific teams in a way that balances the agents’ work resources in proportion to the ...