Simultaneous task subdivision and allocation for teams of heterogeneous robots

In this paper, we present a negotiation protocol for simultaneous task subdivision and allocation for heterogeneous multi-robot systems. An abstraction of the concept of task is presented that allows to apply the protocol on a variety of tasks. The negotiation adopts Rubinstein's alternate offers protocol, where offers are evaluated and generated using a heuristic search step. The protocol has been tested on computer simulations.