Robot-Task Suitability in Heterogeneous Multi-Robot Task Allocation

Abstract

Heterogeneous multi-robot task allocation depends on estimates of how suitable individual robots are for candidate tasks, yet suitability can be defined in substantially different ways. We compare ten deterministic methods and two LLM-based variants spanning rule-based, similarity-based, requirement-oriented, fuzzy, and semantic approaches. Using common robot and task profiles, we compare how the methods score and rank candidate robots, identify feasibility, and select a top robot, while examining how these outcomes change with team composition, scale, spatial context, capability uncertainty, and task representation. The methods frequently disagree despite operating on identical scenarios. Generic similarity measures can violate properties expected under a one-sided requirement-satisfaction interpretation of suitability, while LLM-based scoring introduces additional stochastic and linguistic sensitivity. These results show that robot--task suitability should be treated as an explicit modeling choice whose assumptions, robustness, and decision-level consequences should be considered before allocation.