Adaptive heterogeneous multi-robot collaboration from formal task specifications

• DOI: 10.1016/j.robot.2021.103866
• Publication Date: 2021-08-17T04:06:55Z
• Authors: Philipp Schillinger; Sergio García; Alexandros Makris; Konstantinos Rodi...; Michalis Logothetis; Konstantinos Alev...; Wei Ren; Pouria Tajvar; Patrizio Pelliccione; Antonis Argyros; Kostas J. Kyriako...; Dimos V. Dimarogonas
• Keywords: Enabling; Formalism (music)

Abstract Efficiently coordinating different types of robots is an important enabler for many commercial and industrial automation tasks. Here, we present a distributed framework that enables a team of heterogeneous robots to dynamically generate actions from a common, user-defined goal specification. In particular, we discuss the integration of various robotic capabilities into a common task allocation and planning formalism, as well as the specification of expressive, temporally-extended goals by non-expert users. Models for task allocation and execution both consider non-deterministic outcomes of actions and thus, are suitable for a wide range of real-world tasks including formally specified reactions to online observations. One main focus of our paper is to evaluate the framework and its integration of software modules through a number of experiments. These experiments comprise industry-inspired scenarios as motivated by future real-world applications. Finally, we discuss the results and learnings for motivating practically relevant, future research questions.