Conflict resolution with minimal communication bandwidth

Task Assignment for Multi-Robot Systems is a main issue to attain good performance in complex real world environments. In several application domains tasks to be executed are not inserted into the system by an external entity but are perceived by robots during mission execution. In this paper we explicitly focus on detecting and solving conflicts that may arise during the task assignment process. We propose a conflict resolution method based only on point to point messages. The approach is able to guarantee a conflict free allocation using a very limited communication bandwidth. We also present an extension to make the system robust to possible network failures. © 2006 IEEE.