This paper considers the problem of servicing a set of locations by a fleet of robots so as to minimize overall makespan. Although motivated by a specific real-world, multi-robot drilling and fastening application, the problem also arises in a range of other multi-robot domains where service start times are subject to precedence constraints and robots must be routed in space and time to avoid collisions. We formalize this general problem and analyze its complexity. We develop a heuristic local search procedure for solving it and analyze its performance on a set of synthetically generated problem instances, some of which capture the specific structure of the motivating drilling and fastening application, and others that generalize to other application settings. We provide a differential analysis of our local search procedure and a comparison to other approaches to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed heuristic.

本文考虑了由一组机器人为一组位置提供服务的问题，从而最大程度地减少了总制造时间。尽管是由特定的现实世界中的多机器人钻探和紧固应用引起的，但该问题也出现在其他多个多机器人域中，在这些域中，服务开始时间受到优先约束，并且必须在空间和时间上对机器人进行布线以避免碰撞。我们将这个一般问题形式化，并分析其复杂性。我们开发了一种启发式的本地搜索程序来解决它，并在一组综合生成的问题实例上分析其性能，其中一些实例捕获了激励性钻井和紧固应用程序的特定结构，而另一些则推广到其他应用程序设置。