Robotic Swarm Control from Spatio-Temporal Specifications
This addresses the challenge of precise swarm coordination for applications like surveillance or formation tasks, but appears incremental as it builds on existing logic and optimization methods.
The paper tackles the problem of controlling a robotic swarm to achieve complex spatio-temporal patterns by encoding formal specifications into mixed integer linear constraints and optimizing trajectories for minimal movement and pattern adherence, with an illustrative case study provided.
In this paper, we study the problem of controlling a two-dimensional robotic swarm with the purpose of achieving high level and complex spatio-temporal patterns. We use a rich spatio-temporal logic that is capable of describing a wide range of time varying and complex spatial configurations, and develop a method to encode such formal specifications as a set of mixed integer linear constraints, which are incorporated into a mixed integer linear programming problem. We plan trajectories for each individual robot such that the whole swarm satisfies the spatio-temporal requirements, while optimizing total robot movement and/or a metric that shows how strongly the swarm trajectory resembles given spatio-temporal behaviors. An illustrative case study is included.