Time-Ordered Ad-hoc Resource Sharing for Independent Robotic Agents

TL;DR

This paper introduces a SAT-based method for optimal resource sharing among independent robots, enabling efficient ad-hoc scheduling in real-world multi-robot systems.

Contribution

It presents a novel algorithm converting constrained resource assignments into weighted-SAT problems and encodes time constraints in CNF for optimal solutions.

Findings

Algorithms effectively handle real-world robot scenarios

Benchmark results demonstrate efficiency and scalability

Open-source tools support practical deployment

Abstract

Resource sharing is a crucial part of a multi-robot system. We propose a Boolean satisfiability based approach to resource sharing. Our key contributions are an algorithm for converting any constrained assignment to a weighted-SAT based optimization. We propose a theorem that allows optimal resource assignment problems to be solved via repeated application of a SAT solver. Additionally we show a way to encode continuous time ordering constraints using Conjunctive Normal Form (CNF). We benchmark our new algorithms and show that they can be used in an ad-hoc setting. We test our algorithms on a fleet of simulated and real world robots and show that the algorithms are able to handle real world situations. Our algorithms and test harnesses are opensource and build on Open-RMFs fleet management system.