A Formal Design Methodology for Coordinated Multi-Robot Systems

To enable the successful deployment of task-achieving multi-robot systems (MRS), the interactions must be coordinated among the robots within the MRS and between the robots and the task environment. There have been a number of experimentally demonstrated coordinated MRS; however, most have been designed through ad hoc procedures, typically providing task-specific, empirical insights with few contributions toward general-purpose, principled design methods. This proposal presents a formal MRS design methodology applicable to homogeneous, distributed MRS performing sequential tasks in a Markovian world. We introduce a suite of systematic methods for synthesizing satisficing controllers for robots constituting a MRS. Each of these methods synthesizes a MRS that achieves system-level, task-directed coordination through the use of a variety of local control features: inter-robot communication, the maintenance of internal state, and both deterministic and probabilistic action selection. Complimentary to the synthesis methods, we present two MRS modeling approaches that share a common formal foundation with the MRS synthesis methods. The first modeling approach is a Bayesian macroscopic model and the second is a probabilistic microscopic model. Both models are capable of quantitatively predicting the task performance of a given MRS. Together, the unified synthesis and analysis methods provide more than just pragmatic design tools. Based on their common formal foundations and integrated nature, they provide a platform from which to formally characterize some relationships and dependencies among MRS task requirements, individual robot control and capabilities, and resulting task performance. ii The proposed formal design methodology is validated in a multi-robot construction task domain through physically-realistic simulations and real-robot demonstrations. A variety of different MRS are synthesized and analyzed in this domain using our formal design methodology.