Simultaneous task allocation and planning for temporal logic goals in heterogeneous multi-robot systems

Abstract

This paper describes a framework for automatically generating optimal action-level behavior for a team of robots based on temporal logic mission specifications under resource constraints. The proposed approach optimally allocates separable tasks to available robots, without requiring a priori an explicit representation of the tasks or the computation of all task execution costs. Instead, we propose an approach for identifying sub-tasks in an automaton representation of the mission specification and for simultaneously allocating the tasks and planning their execution. The proposed framework avoids the need to compute a combinatorial number of possible assignment costs, where each computation itself requires solving a complex planning problem. This can improve computational efficiency compared with classical assignment solutions, in particular for on-demand missions where task costs are unknown in advance. We demonstrate the applicability of the approach with multiple robots in an existing office environment and evaluate its performance in several case study scenarios.