2024 IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering Best Paper Award

We are thrilled to announce that our paper "Group-based Distributed Auction Algorithms for Multi-Robot Task Assignment", authored by Xiaoshan Bai, Andres Fielbaum, Maximilian Kronmüller, Luzia Knoedler, and Javier Alonso-Mora, has received the 2024 IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering Best Paper Award!

This work tackles the NP-hard problem of efficiently assigning a fleet of robots to dynamically transport packages, minimizing their travel time while meeting time-window constraints. We propose two group-based distributed auction algorithms that enable robots to calculate feasible task groups and find optimal assignments through communication—resulting in impressive performance improvements over centralized and greedy approaches. 

Our algorithms offer practical solutions for large-scale multi-robot task assignment, opening up possibilities for real-world distributed applications in logistics and automation.

A big thank you to our sponsors that made this work possible, Amazon (Amazon Research Awards), Ahold Delhaize (AI for Retail Lab), European Commission (H2020 Harmony project 101017008).

And, a big thank you to the IEEE T-ASE community for this recognition!

Here is the link to the paper: https://autonomousrobots.nl/assets/files/publications/22_Bai_TASE.pdf
And to a project website: https://autonomousrobots.nl/projects/ara