A Noise Based Distributed Optimization Method for Multirobot Task Allocation With Multimodal Utility

Distributed optimization methods have been used extensively in multirobot task allocation (MRTA) problems. In distributed optimization domain, most of the algorithms are developed for solving convex optimization problems. However, for complex MRTA problems, the cost function can be nonconvex and multimodal in nature with more than one minimum or maximum points. In this paper, an effort has been made to address these complex MRTA problems with multimodal cost functions in a distributed manner. The approach used in this paper is a distributed primal–dual interior point method where noise is added in the search direction as a mechanism to allow the algorithm to escape from suboptimal solutions. The search direction from the distributed primal–dual interior point method and the weighted variable updates help in the generation of feasible primal and dual solutions and in faster convergence while the noise added in the search direction helps in avoiding local optima. The optimality and the computation time of this proposed method are compared with that of the genetic algorithm (GA) and the numerical results are provided in this paper.