Mission specification and decomposition for multi-robot systems

Abstract

Service robots are increasingly being used to perform missions comprising dangerous or tedious tasks previously executed by humans. However, their users—who know the environment and requirements for these missions—have limited or no robotics experience. As such, they often find the process of allocating concrete tasks to each robot within a multi-robot system (MRS) very challenging. Our paper introduces a framework for Multi-Robot mission Specification and decomposition (MutRoSe) that simplifies and automates key activities of this process. To that end, MutRoSe allows an MRS mission designer to define all relevant aspects of a mission and its environment in a high-level specification language that accounts for the variability of real-world scenarios, the dependencies between task instances, and the reusability of task libraries. Additionally, MutRoSe automates the decomposition of MRS missions defined in this language into task instances, which can then be allocated to specific robots for execution—with all task dependencies appropriately taken into account. We illustrate the application of MutRoSe and show its effectiveness for four missions taken from a recently published repository of MRS applications.