Simultaneous Area Search and Task Assignment for a Team of Cooperative Agents

Many strategies exist for the coordinated search and exploration of an unknown region, however many multi-agent applications must do more than search a space: they must act upon objects that are found in the search. There can be a strong coupling between these two problems, and this paper explores the simultaneous search of an unknown region and assignment of tasks to agents. Specifically, we cast the search and task assignment decision into a unified optimization framework, and we propose a coordination strategy that generates a sequence of way-points to simultaneously accomplish area search and task assignment. Computational complexity is mitigated by a two-stage algorithm based on the satisficing approach, and a method of preventing cooperative instability (churn) is addressed.