Distributed pair-wised transportation planning with incidental deliveries for multiple mobile robots

Aiming for the practical applications of warehousing logistics and social services, we study the multiple mobile robots cooperative transportation (MRCT) problem in this paper. A group of transportation robots are assigned to accomplish a set of pair-wised transportation tasks, each task has different time window constraints and capacity requirements. We incorporate the auction mechanism and propose an incidental delivery based approach to solve the MRCT problem. The proposed approach is fully distributed and can be extended to fulfill the online transportation planning or replanning requirement in the dynamic environment. Simulation results demonstrate the advanced performance of the proposed MRCT approach in large-scale transportation problems, and experiment results validate the practical applicability of the proposed approach in practical warehousing applications.