Reactive switching protocols for multi-robot high-level tasks

This paper considers a team of cooperative, homogeneous robots operating in a nondeterministic environment, performing complex high-level tasks. We concurrently solve the problems of dynamic task assignment and reactive planning in a centralized fashion, allowing goal reassignment as needed in response to changes in the environment. To this end, we model the team of robots as a switched system whose various modes must be activated to satisfy high-level specifications, and describe a formal framework for synthesizing switching protocols for this system. The robots' continuous dynamics under a specific task allocation, as well as their operating environment, are encoded as formulas on a discrete abstraction, in the GR(1) fragment of linear temporal logic. The synthesized protocols ensure that the multi-robot task is fulfilled even in adversarial environments, and the presented abstraction provides a significant computational improvement over previous approaches. We illustrate these ideas in simulation, with applications to intrusion detection and surveillance.