학술논문

Congestion-Aware Policy Synthesis for Multirobot Systems
Document Type
Periodical
Source
IEEE Transactions on Robotics IEEE Trans. Robot. Robotics, IEEE Transactions on. 38(1):262-280 Feb, 2022
Subject
Robotics and Control Systems
Computing and Processing
Components, Circuits, Devices and Systems
Robots
Planning
Robot kinematics
Markov processes
Navigation
Collision avoidance
Probabilistic logic
Formal verification
multirobot systems
planning under uncertainty
temporal uncertainty
Language
ISSN
1552-3098
1941-0468
Abstract
Multirobot systems must be able to maintain performance when robots get delayed during execution. For mobile robots, one source of delays is congestion . Congestion occurs when robots deployed in shared physical spaces interact, as robots present in the same area simultaneously must maneuver to avoid each other. Congestion can adversely affect navigation performance and increase the duration of navigation actions. In this article, we present a multirobot planning framework that utilizes learnt probabilistic models of how congestion affects navigation duration. Central to our framework is a probabilistic reservation table , which summarizes robot plans, capturing the effects of congestion. To plan, we solve a sequence of single-robot time-varying Markov automata , where transition probabilities and rates are obtained from the probabilistic reservation table. We also present an iterative model refinement procedure for accurately predicting execution-time robot performance. We evaluate our framework with extensive experiments on synthetic data and simulated robot behavior.