Modular mobile manipulators coalition formation through distributed transportation tasks allocation

Abstract

The use of mobile manipulators for transportation tasks has provided solutions to several flexibility problems in manufacturing systems. Mobile manipulators are mobile entities equipped with robotic arm for loading and unloading of parts and an Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV) for their transport. In order to increase further the flexibility of these systems, the mobile manipulators could be modular, where their two entities are able to work together or separately. The assignment of transportation operations to different smart entities working together is a complex problem, which has not been addressed sufficiently in the literature. This paper proposes a two-stage decision approach for transportation task assignment, which is based on auction mechanism and a coalition formation process modeled with integer linear programming. A real use case has been implemented to test the efficiency of the proposed method. The proposed approach gives promising results that are discussed.