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Automated synthesis of decentralized controllers for robot swarms from high-level temporal logic specifications

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Abstract

The majority of work in the field of swarm robotics focuses on the bottom-up design of local rules for individual robots that create emergent swarm behaviors. In this paper, we take a top-down approach and consider the following problem: how can we specify a desired collective behavior and automatically synthesize decentralized controllers that can be distributed over robots to achieve the collective objective in a provably correct way? We propose a formal specification language for the high-level description of swarm behaviors on both the swarm and individual levels. We present algorithms for automated synthesis of decentralized controllers and synchronization skeletons that describe how groups of robots must coordinate to satisfy the specification. We demonstrate our proposed approach through an example in simulation.

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Notes

  1. This is a special case of the minimal hitting set problem (Kleinberg and Tardos 2006).

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank Rüdiger Ehlers for insightful discussions relating to the need for quantitative analysis of the synthesized symbolic plan.

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  1. Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Cornell University, Ithaca, USA

    Salar Moarref & Hadas Kress-Gazit

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  1. Salar Moarref
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  2. Hadas Kress-Gazit
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Correspondence to Salar Moarref.

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This research was supported by DARPA N66001-17-2-4058.

This is one of the several papers published in Autonomous Robots comprising the Special Issue on Multi-Robot and Multi-Agent Systems.

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Moarref, S., Kress-Gazit, H. Automated synthesis of decentralized controllers for robot swarms from high-level temporal logic specifications. Auton Robot 44, 585–600 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10514-019-09861-4

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