Combinatorial Problems in Multirobot Battery Exchange Systems

This paper addresses combinatorial problems that arise in multirobot battery exchange systems. The multirobot battery exchange system addressed herein is characterized by two types of robots: task robots that provide services at requested locations and delivery robots that deliver charged batteries to task robots when required. Combinatorial problems arising in these systems involve multiple aspects of resource scheduling and path planning that make them more complex than well-known combinatorial problems studied in operations research. We present several heuristic algorithms for solving these combinatorial problems. Our algorithms are inspired by techniques used in artificial intelligence and the design of approximation algorithms. We demonstrate the performance of our algorithms in simulation and analyze how they scale with increasing size of the multirobot system.