Combined Top-down and Bottom-up Approach to Cooperative Distributed Multi-agent Control with Connectivity Constraints

Abstract

We propose a novel framework to synthesize coordination and control strategies for multi-agent systems from team tasks that are in the form of regular languages specifying service requests. The framework incorporates top-down design approaches with bottom-up control schemes: on one hand, a formal approach is applied to distribute the local tasks based on service capabilities of each agent and to synthesize local supervisors associated with each agent to fulfill the local tasks; on the other hand, by modeling the physical motion dynamics of an agent as a single integrator system, a connectivity-preserving controller with only position measurements is designed such that motion behaviors of cooperating agents are subject to communication constraints. The performance of the underlying framework is guaranteed by using a technique that is inspired by compositional verification while the communication constraints can always be obeyed. A motion and mission co-planning example of a robotic system is presented.