A hierarchical approach to automatic deployment of robotic teams with communication constraints

We consider the following problem: GIVEN (1) a set of service requests occurring at known locations in an environment, (2) a set of temporal and logical constraints on how the requests need to be serviced, (3) a team of robots and their capacities to service the requests individually or through collaboration, FIND robot control and communication strategies guaranteeing the correct servicing of the requests. Our approach is hierarchical. At the top level, we check whether the specification, which is a regular expression over the requests, is distributable among the robots given their service and cooperation capabilities; if the answer is positive, we generate individual specifications in the form of finite state automata, and interaction rules in the form of synchronizations on shared requests. At the bottom level, we check whether the local specifications and the synchronizations can be implemented given the motion and communication constraints of the robots; if the answer is positive, we generate robot motion and service plans, which are then mapped to control and communication strategies. We illustrate the method with experimental and simulation results.