Multi-robot systems are emerging as a promising solution to the growing demand for productivity and safety across industrial sectors. However, effectively coordinating multiple robots in dynamic and uncertain environments, such as construction sites, remains a challenge, particularly due to unpredictable factors like material delays, unexpected site conditions, and weather-induced disruptions. To address these challenges, this study proposes an adaptive task allocation framework that strategically leverages the synergistic potential of Digital Twins, Integer Programming (IP), and Large Language Models (LLMs). The multi-robot task allocation problem is formally modeled using IP, considering task dependencies, robot heterogeneity, scheduling constraints, and replanning needs. A narrative-driven schedule adaptation mechanism is introduced, where unstructured natural language inputs are interpreted by an LLM to autonomously update optimization constraints, enabling human-in-the-loop flexibility without manual programming. A digital twin system enables real-time synchronization between physical operations and their digital representations and serves as the user interface, creating a closed-loop feedback mechanism that keeps the system responsive to site changes. A case study demonstrates both the computational efficiency of the optimization algorithm and the reasoning performance of LLMs, achieving over 97% accuracy in constraint and parameter extraction. The results confirm the practicality, adaptability, and cross-domain applicability of the proposed methods.

The increasing complexity of modern manufacturing, coupled with demand fluctuation, supply chain uncertainties, and product customization, underscores the need for manufacturing systems that can flexibly update their configurations and swiftly adapt to disturbances. However, current research falls short in providing a holistic reconfigurable manufacturing framework that seamlessly monitors system disturbances, optimizes alternative line configurations based on machine capabilities, and automates simulation evaluation for swift adaptations. This paper presents a dynamic manufacturing line reconfiguration framework to handle disturbances that result in operation time changes. The framework incorporates a system process digital twin for monitoring disturbances and triggering reconfigurations, a capability-based ontology model capturing available agent and resource options, a configuration optimizer generating optimal line configurations, and a simulation generation program initializing simulation setups and evaluating line configurations at approximately 400x real-time speed. A case study of a battery production line has been conducted to evaluate the proposed framework. In two implemented disturbance scenarios, the framework successfully recovers system throughput with limited resources, preventing the 26% and 63% throughput drops that would have occurred without a reconfiguration plan. The reconfiguration optimizer efficiently finds optimal solutions, taking an average of 0.03 seconds to find a reconfiguration plan for a manufacturing line with 51 operations and 40 available agents across 8 agent types.

This article develops a stochastic programming framework for multiagent systems, where task decomposition, assignment, and scheduling problems are simultaneously optimized. The framework can be applied to heterogeneous mobile robot teams with distributed subtasks. Examples include pandemic robotic service coordination, explore and rescue, and delivery systems with heterogeneous vehicles. Owing to their inherent flexibility and robustness, multiagent systems are applied in a growing range of real-world problems that involve heterogeneous tasks and uncertain information. Most previous works assume one fixed way to decompose a task into roles that can later be assigned to the agents. This assumption is not valid for a complex task where the roles can vary and multiple decomposition structures exist. Meanwhile, it is unclear how uncertainties in task requirements and agent capabilities can be systematically quantified and optimized under a multiagent system setting. A representation for complex tasks is proposed: agent capabilities are represented as a vector of random distributions, and task requirements are verified by a generalizable binary function. The conditional value at risk is chosen as a metric in the objective function to generate robust plans. An efficient algorithm is described to solve the model, and the whole framework is evaluated in two different practical test cases: capture-the-flag and robotic service coordination during a pandemic (e.g., COVID-19). Results demonstrate that the framework is generalizable, is scalable up to 140 agents and 40 tasks for the example test cases, and provides low-cost plans that ensure a high probability of success.

For robot swarms operating on complex missions in an uncertain environment, it is important that the decision-making algorithm considers both heterogeneity and uncertainty. This paper presents a stochastic programming framework for the vehicle routing problem with stochastic travel energy costs and heterogeneous vehicles and tasks. We represent the heterogeneity as linear constraints, estimate the uncertain energy cost through Gaussian process regression, formulate this stochasticity as chance constraints or stochastic recourse costs, and then solve the stochastic programs using branch and cut algorithms to minimize the expected energy cost. The performance and practicality are demonstrated through extensive computational experiments and a practical test case.

State-of-the-art forward facing monocular visual-inertial odometry algorithms are often brittle in practice, especially whilst dealing with initialisation and motion in directions that render the state unobservable. In such cases having a reliable complementary odometry algorithm enables robust and resilient flight. Using the common local planarity assumption, we present a fast, dense, and direct frame-to-frame visual-inertial odometry algorithm for downward facing cameras that minimises a joint cost function involving a homography based photometric cost and an IMU regularisation term. Via extensive evaluation in a variety of scenarios we demonstrate superior performance than existing state-of-the-art downward facing odometry algorithms for Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs).