Coordination-Aware Task Allocation Via a Lightweight Supervisory Layer
An Event-Driven Approach to Multi-Agent Search and Rescue
T.R. Schutgens (TU Delft - Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)
Anahita Jamshidnejad – Mentor (TU Delft - Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)
S. Schoonebeek – Mentor (TU Delft - Mechanical Engineering)
L. Cavalcante Siebert – Graduation committee member (TU Delft - Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)
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Abstract
Task allocation in multi-robot Search and Rescue (SaR) is challenging: the environment is unknown, time-critical, and too dynamic for continuous centralized planning. This paper asks how a lightweight supervisory framework can dynamically allocate sub-tasks within a multi-robot team to balance exploration and victim retrieval without incurring prohibitive computational costs. We propose an event-driven, auction-based supervisory layer that intervenes only on discrete triggers; spatial conflicts, agent stagnation, and victim discovery, leaving robots to operate autonomously otherwise. Compared to a purely decentralized baseline across 216 simulated missions, the supervisor raises the victim discovery success rate from 50.5% to 91.7%, locates all victims roughly 24% faster without meaningfully increasing computation time. When extended to a heterogeneous fleet including a dedicated rescue agent, these exploration gains persist, but the increased rate of victim discovery outpaces single-agent rescue capacity, revealing a trade-off between exploration efficiency and victim retrieval throughput that the current allocation mechanism does not yet resolve.
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