Cooperative task planning of multi-robot systems with temporal constraints

This paper discusses a design methodology of cooperative trajectory generation for multi-robot systems. The trajectory of achieving cooperative tasks, i.e., with temporal constraints, is constructed by a nonlinear trajectory generation (NTG) algorithm. Three scenarios of multi-robot tasking are proposed at the cooperative task planning framework. The NTG algorithm is, then, used to generate real-time trajectory for desired robot activities. Given robot dynamics and constraints, the NTG algorithm first finds trajectory curves in a lower dimensional space and parameterizes the curves by a set of B-spline representations. The coefficients of the B-splines are further solved by sequential quadratic programming to satisfy the optimization objectives and constraints. The NTG algorithm has been implemented to generate real-time trajectories for a group of cooperative robots in the presence of spatial and temporal constraints. Finally, an illustrated example of cooperative task planning with temporal constraints is presented.