Alphabet Soup: A Testbed for Studying Resource Allocation in Multi-vehicle Systems

We present ALPHABET SOUP, a Java-based model of a multivehicle warehouse that frames control and coordination issues. By presenting this abstract model of an actual system, we hope to expose the research community to the commercially consequential issues of resource allocation and robot motion planning. In ALPHABET SOUP, robots must be used to move buckets of letters from letter receiving stations to word-assembly stations. We discuss potential research problems, and in particular how the resource management problems are particularly well suited for auction-based resource management.

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