Multiobjective Task Allocation for Electric Harvesting Robots: A Hierarchical Route Reconstruction Approach
针对果园采摘中多机器人协调的完工时间和能耗冲突，定义了多目标农业电动机器人任务分配问题，并提出一种混合分层路径重构算法，在45个测试实例上优于七种现有算法。
The increasing labor costs in agriculture have accelerated the adoption of multirobot systems for orchard harvesting. However, efficiently coordinating these systems is challenging due to the complex interplay between makespan and energy consumption, particularly under practical constraints like load-dependent speed variations and battery limitations. This article defines the multiobjective agricultural multielectrical-robot task allocation (AMERTA) problem, which systematically incorporates these often-overlooked real-world constraints. To address this problem, we propose a hybrid hierarchical route reconstruction algorithm (HRRA) that integrates several innovative mechanisms, including a hierarchical encoding structure, a dual-phase initialization method, task-sequence optimizers, and specialized route reconstruction operators. Extensive experiments on 45 test instances demonstrate HRRA's superior performance against seven state-of-the-art algorithms. Statistical analysis, including the Wilcoxon signed-rank and Friedman tests, empirically validates HRRA's competitiveness and its unique ability to explore previously inaccessible regions of the solution space. In general, this research contributes to the theoretical understanding of multirobot coordination by offering a novel problem formulation and an effective algorithm, thereby also providing practical insights for agricultural automation.