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Fair Robust Assignment Using Redundancy

Accepted version
Peer-reviewed

Type

Conference Object

Change log

Abstract

We study the consideration of fairness in redundant assignment for multi-agent task allocation. It has recently been shown that redundant assignment of agents to tasks provides robustness to uncertainty in task performance. However, the question of how to fairly assign these redundant resources across tasks remains unaddressed. In this paper, we present a novel problem formulation for fair redundant task allocation, in which we cast it as the optimization of worst-case task costs. Solving this problem optimally is NP-hard. Therefore, we exploit properties of supermodularity to propose a polynomial-time, near-optimal solution. Our algorithm provides a solution set that is α times larger than the optimal set size in order to guarantee a solution cost at least as good as the optimal target cost. We derive the sub- optimality bound on this cardinality relaxation, α. Additionally, we demonstrate that our algorithm performs near-optimally without the cardinality relaxation. We show the algorithm in simulations of redundant assignments of robots to goal nodes on transport networks with uncertain travel times. Empirically, our algorithm outperforms benchmarks, scales to large problems, and provides improvements in both fairness and average utility.

Description

Keywords

Ethics and philosophy, fairness, multi-robot systems, submodular optimization, task planning

Journal Title

IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters

Conference Name

IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation

Journal ISSN

2377-3766
2377-3766

Volume Title

6

Publisher

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)

Rights

All rights reserved
Sponsorship
We gratefully acknowledge the support from ARL Grant DCIST CRA W911NF-17-2-0181, NSF Grant CNS-1521617, ARO Grant W911NF-13-1- 0350, ONR Grants N00014-20-1-2822 and ONR grant N00014-20-S-B001, and Qualcomm Research. The first author acknowledges support from the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship under Grant No. DGE-1845298.