Generalized task allocation and route planning for robots with multiple depots in indoor building environments

Recent advancements in sensing and robotic technologies facilitate the use of on-demand building service robots in the built environment. Multi-robot based systems have arguably more advantages when compared to fixed sensor-based and single-robot based systems. These task-oriented building service robots face several challenges, such as task-allocation and route-planning. Previous studies adopted approaches from other domains, such as outdoor logistics, and made application-specific assumptions. This study proposes a new methodology to optimize the task-allocation and route-planning for multiple indoor robots with multiple starts and destination depots where each robot begins and ends at the same depot (referred to as a fixed destination multi-depot multiple traveling salesman problem-fMmTSP). The performance of the proposed algorithm was compared with two existing outdoor-based algorithms. Results show that the proposed algorithm performs better in almost all the cases for the assumed network, which supports the need to develop algorithms specifically for indoor networks.