A Plan Manager for Multi-robot Systems

This paper presents a software component, the plan database, which provides the services needed to build and execute plans in a multi-robot context. This plan database handles fully dynamic plans (insertion and removal of tasks), provides tools for safe concurrent execution and modification of plans, and handles distributed plan supervision without permanent robot-to-robot communication. The proposed concept is illustrated by a simulated example that involves a rover and an UAV in an initially unmapped environment.