Motion and Cooperative Transportation Planning for Multi-Agent Systems under Temporal Logic Formulas

This paper presents a hybrid control framework for the motion planning of a multi-agent system including N robotic agents and M objects, under high level goals expressed as Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) formulas. In particular, we design control protocols that allow the transition of the agents as well as the cooperative transportation of the objects by the agents, among predefined regions of interest in the workspace. This allows to abstract the coupled behavior of the agents and the objects as a finite transition system and to design a high-level multi-agent plan that satisfies the agents’ and the objects’ specifications, given as temporal logic formulas. Simulation results verify the proposed framework. Note to Practitioners—This paper is mainly motivated by scenarios that include multiple robots and objects of interest that have to be transported and/or processed in a certain way (e.g., manufacturing, rescue missions) according to temporal logic formulas. In contrast to existing methodologies, we define such objectives not only for the robots, but also for the objects (e.g., “take object 1 to region A infintely many times while avoiding region B”). The key idea of our methodology lies in the construction of a discrete transition system that captures the motion of the agents and the objects around the workspace, which is based on the design of continuous control laws for agent navigation and cooperative object transportation. With this abstraction in hand, we are able to derive hybrid control protocols that satisfy the given temporal logic formulas for the coupled multi-agent system.