Bottom-up motion and task coordination for loosely-coupled multi-agent systems with dependent local tasks

Abstract

We propose a bottom-up motion and task coordination scheme for loosely-coupled multi-agent systems under dependent local tasks. Instead of defining a global task for the whole team, each agent is assigned locally a task as syntactically co-safe linear temporal logic formulas that specify both motion and action requirements. Inter-agent dependency is introduced by collaborative actions of which the execution requires multiple agents' collaboration. The proposed solution contains an offline initial plan synthesis, an on-line request-reply messages exchange and a real-time plan adaptation algorithm. It is distributed in that any decision is made locally based on local computation and local communication within neighboring agents. It is scalable and resilient to agent failures as the dependency is formed and removed dynamically based on the plan execution status and agent capabilities, instead of pre-assigned agent identities. The overall scheme is demonstrated by a simulated scenario.