Abstract
Existing approaches for coordinating teams of heterogeneous agents either consider small numbers of agents, are application-specific solutions, or do not adequately address requirements, e.g., deadlines or inter-task dependencies, common to real-world applications. We develop a framework called Scalable and Robust Algorithms for Task-based Coordination from High-level Specifications (ScRATCHS) to coordinate such teams. We define a specification language, called capability temporal logic (CaTL), to describe rich, temporal properties involving tasks requiring the participation of multiple agents with multiple capabilities, e.g., sensors or end effectors. An example specification is “Ensure at least 10 airborne cameras and 3 airborne lidars are surveying Site A for at least 15 min simultaneously during every hour-long period. Make sure that 5 cameras are always observing Site B. Send 10 lidars to Site B within 3 h of deployment and remain there until 4 ground vehicles with infrared sensors arrive 2 h later.” Arbitrary missions and team dynamics are jointly encoded as constraints in a mixed integer linear program (MILP), which can be solved efficiently using commercial off-the-shelf solvers. ScRATCHS also enables optimization of the resulting plan to be maximally robust to agent attrition at the penalty of increased computation time. The flexible specification language, fast solution time, and optional robustness of ScRATCHS provide a first step towards a multi-purpose on-the-fly planning tool for a supervisor tasking large teams with multiple capabilities enacting missions with multiple tasks. We validate our approach using randomized computational experiments and via a hardware demonstration.
DISTRIBUTION STATEMENT A. Approved for public release. Distribution is unlimited.
This material is based upon work supported by the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering under Air Force Contract No. FA8702-15-D-0001. Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Task 1 is achieved by omitting red regions and transitions from our construction of Env.
References
Baier, C., Katoen, J.-P.: Principles of Model Checking. MIT Press, Cambridge (2008)
Belta, C., Yordanov, B., Gol, E.A.: Formal Methods for Discrete-Time Dynamical Systems, vol. 89. Springer, Cham (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50763-7
Chen, Y., Ding, X.C., Stefanescu, A., Belta, C.: Formal approach to the deployment of distributed robotic teams. IEEE Trans. Robot. 28(1), 158–171 (2012)
Choi, H.-L., Brunet, L., How, J.P.: Consensus-based decentralized auctions for robust task allocation. IEEE Trans. Robot. 25(4), 912–926 (2009)
Connell, D., La, H.M.: Extended rapidly exploring random tree–based dynamic path planning and replanning for mobile robots. Int. J. Adv. Robot. Syst. 15(3), 1–15 (2018)
Cortes, J., Egerstedt, M.: Coordinated control of multi-robot systems: a survey. SICE J. Control Measur. Syst. Integr. 10(6), 495–503 (2017)
Diaz-Mercado, Y., Jones, A., Belta, C., Egerstedt, M.: Correct-by-construction control synthesis for multi-robot mixing. In: 2015 54th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), pp. 221–226, December 2015
Donzé, A., Maler, O.: Robust satisfaction of temporal logic over real-valued signals. In: Chatterjee, K., Henzinger, T.A. (eds.) FORMATS 2010. LNCS, vol. 6246, pp. 92–106. Springer, Heidelberg (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-15297-9_9
Guo, M., Dimarogonas, D.V.: Multi-agent plan reconfiguration under local LTL specifications. Int. J. Robot. Res. 34(2), 218–235 (2015)
Guo, M., Dimarogonas, D.V.: Task and motion coordination for heterogeneous multiagent systems with loosely coupled local tasks. IEEE Trans. Autom. Sci. Eng. 14(2), 797–808 (2017)
Haghighi, I., Sadraddini, S., Belta, C.: Robotic swarm control from spatio-temporal specifications. In: 2016 IEEE 55th Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), pp. 5708–5713. IEEE (2016)
Karaman, S., Frazzoli, E.: Vehicle routing problem with metric temporal logic specifications. In: 2008 47th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, CDC 2008, pp. 3953–3958. IEEE (2008)
Karlsson, J., Vasile, C.-I., Tumova, J., Karaman, S., Rus, D.: Multi-vehicle motion planning for social optimal mobility-on-demand. In: 2018 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), pp. 7298–7305. IEEE (2018)
Kiener, J., Von Stryk, O.: Cooperation of heterogeneous, autonomous robots: a case study of humanoid and wheeled robots. In: 2007 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, pp. 959–964. IEEE (2007)
Kim, J., Banks, C., Shah, J.: Collaborative planning with encoding of users’ high-level strategies. In: Thirty-First AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (2017)
Korsah, G., Stentz, A., Dias, M.: A comprehensive taxonomy for multi-robot task allocation. Int. J. Robot. Res. 32(12), 1495–1512 (2013)
Leahy, K., Jones, A., Schwager, M., Belta, C.: Distributed information gathering policies under temporal logic constraints. In: 2015 54th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), pp. 6803–6808, December 2015
Linz, P.: An Introduction to Formal Languages and Automata. Jones & Bartlett Learning, Boston (2006)
Maler, O., Nickovic, D.: Monitoring temporal properties of continuous signals. In: Lakhnech, Y., Yovine, S. (eds.) FORMATS/FTRTFT-2004. LNCS, vol. 3253, pp. 152–166. Springer, Heidelberg (2004). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-30206-3_12
Mittelmann, H.D.: Selected benchmark results. In: INFORMS Annual Meeting (2016). http://plato.asu.edu/talks/informs2016_bench.pdf
Pant, Y.V., Abbas, H., Quaye, R.A., Mangharam, R.: Fly-by-logic: control of multi-drone fleets with temporal logic objectives. In: ACM/IEEE International Conference on Cyber-Physical Systems (ICCPS) (2018)
Prorok, A., Hsieh, M.A., Kumar, V.: Fast redistribution of a swarm of heterogeneous robots. In: Proceedings of the 9th EAI International Conference on Bio-Inspired Information and Communications Technologies (formerly BIONETICS), pp. 249–255. ICST (Institute for Computer Sciences, Social-Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering) (2016)
Raman, V., Donzé, A., Maasoumy, M., Murray, R.M., Sangiovanni-Vincentelli, A., Seshia, S.A.: Model predictive control with signal temporal logic specifications. In: 2014 IEEE 53rd Annual Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), pp. 81–87. IEEE (2014)
Sadraddini, S.: Formal methods for resilient control (2018). https://open.bu.edu/handle/2144/27455
Sadraddini, S., Belta, C.: Robust temporal logic model predictive control. In: 2015 53rd Annual Allerton Conference on Communication, Control, and Computing (Allerton), pp. 772–779. IEEE (2015)
Sahin, Y.E., Nilsson, P., Ozay, N.: Multirobot coordination with counting temporal logics. arXiv preprintarXiv:1810.13087 (2018)
Schillinger, P., Bürger, M., Dimarogonas, D.V.: Simultaneous task allocation and planning for temporal logic goals in heterogeneous multi-robot systems. Int. J. Robot. Res. 37(7), 818–838 (2018)
Schlotfeldt, B., Thakur, D., Atanasov, N., Kumar, V., Pappas, G.J.: Anytime planning for decentralized multirobot active information gathering. IEEE Robot. Autom. Lett. 3(2), 1025–1032 (2018)
Simmons, R., et al.: Coordinated deployment of multiple, heterogeneous robots. Technical report, Carnegie-Mellon University, School of Computer Science, Pittsburgh, PA (2000)
Tjeng, V., Xiao, K., Tedrake, R.: Evaluating robustness of neural networks with mixed integer programming. arXiv preprintarXiv:1711.07356 (2017)
Vasile, C.-I., Aksaray, D., Belta, C.: Time window temporal logic. Theor. Comput. Sci. 691, 27–54 (2017)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
1 Electronic supplementary material
Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material.
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Jones, A.M. et al. (2022). ScRATCHS: Scalable and Robust Algorithms for Task-Based Coordination from High-Level Specifications. In: Asfour, T., Yoshida, E., Park, J., Christensen, H., Khatib, O. (eds) Robotics Research. ISRR 2019. Springer Proceedings in Advanced Robotics, vol 20. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95459-8_14
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95459-8_14
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-95458-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-95459-8
eBook Packages: Intelligent Technologies and RoboticsIntelligent Technologies and Robotics (R0)