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Hybrid planning and distributed iterative repair for multi-robot missions with communication losses

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Abstract

This paper presents a planning and execution architecture suited for the initial planning, the execution and the on-board repair of a plan for a multi-robot mission. The team as a whole must accomplish its mission while dealing with online events such as robots breaking down, new objectives for the team, late actions and intermittent communications. We have chosen a “plan then repair” approach where an initial plan is computed offline and updated online whenever disruptive events happen. We have defined an hybrid planner that mixes Partial Order Planning (POP) with a Hierarchical Task Network (HTN)-based modelling of actions. This planner, called HiPOP for Hierarchical Partial-Order Planner, computes plans with temporal flexibility (thus easing its execution) and abstract actions (thus easing the repair process). It uses a symbolic representation of the world and has been extended with geometrical reasoning to adapt to multi-robots missions. Plans are executed in a distributed way: each robot is responsible of executing its own actions, and to propagate delays in its local plan, taking benefit from the temporal flexibility of the plan. When an inconsistency or a failure arises, a distributed repair algorithm based on HiPOP is used to repair the plan, by iteratively removing actions in the plan in order to amend the global plan. This repair is done onboard one of the robot of the team, and takes care of partial communication. The whole architecture has been evaluated through several benchmarks, statistical simulations, and field experiments involving 8 robots.

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Notes

  1. ACTION was a project of ONERA and LAAS-CNRS, funded by the French Procurement Agency. The work described here was used for the final demonstration of the project. For more information, see http://action.onera.fr/.

  2. Similar results were obtained on other domains of the International Planning Competition (IPC) not shown here because of lack of space.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the French Procurement Agency (DGA) for its funding.

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  1. ONERA/DTIS, Université de Toulouse, 2 Avenue Edouard Belin, 31055, Toulouse Cedex 4, France

    Patrick Bechon, Charles Lesire & Magali Barbier

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  1. Patrick Bechon
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Correspondence to Patrick Bechon.

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This is one of the several papers published in Autonomous Robots comprising the Special Issue on Multi-Robot and Multi-Agent Systems.

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Bechon, P., Lesire, C. & Barbier, M. Hybrid planning and distributed iterative repair for multi-robot missions with communication losses. Auton Robot 44, 505–531 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10514-019-09869-w

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