Distributed Sensing Subject to Temporal Logic Constraints

• Published in: 2018 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) pp. 4862 - 4868
• Main Authors: Serlin, Zachary, Leahy, Kevin, Tron, Roberto, Belta, Calin
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.10.2018
• Subjects: Automata; Linear programming; Planning; Robot sensing systems; Task analysis
• ISSN: 2153-0866
• DOI: 10.1109/IROS.2018.8593574

This paper considers the combination of temporal logic (TL) specifications and local objective functions to create online, multiagent, motion plans. These plans are guaranteed to satisfy a persistent mission TL specification and locally optimize an objective function (e.g. in this paper, a cost based on information entropy). The presented approach decouples the two tasks by assigning sub-teams of agents to fulfill the TL specification, while unassigned agents optimize the objective function locally. This paper also presents a novel decoupling of the classic product automaton based approach while maintaining satisfaction guarantees. We also qualitatively show that optimality loss in the local greedy minimization due to the TL constraints can be approximated based on specification complexity. This approach is evaluated with a set of simulations and an experiment of 6 robots with real sensors.