Task allocation and collision-free path planning of centralized multi-robots system for industrial plant inspection using heuristic methods

Multi-robots systems have been effectively employed in various application domains. This study aimed at developing some heuristic methods for the task allocation and collision-free path planning for three robots working in the common workspace. In an application domain, there were ninety fixed locations in a plant, which were to be inspected by three robots after traveling through the minimum distance. Moreover, overall task completion time was to be as minimum as possible. A genetic algorithm (GA) had been used for the task allocation, and A* algorithm was utilized for path planning. The previous work on the same problem (Liu and Kroll, 2012) did not address the issue of collision avoidance in detail, which had been attempted in this study. Results of this study were found to be better than those of the previous work (Liu and Kroll, 2012). It could happen so, due to the reason that the GA was utilized in this study not only to schedule the tasks but also to assign optimal number of tasks to each robot. Thus, more environmental conditions were encoded in the GA-string. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.