Distributed Communication-aware Motion Planning for Networked Mobile Robots under Formal Specifications
For multi-robot systems where motion and communication are tightly coupled, this work provides a formal control-theoretic framework to simultaneously achieve task specifications and communication QoS.
This paper proposes a distributed motion planning framework for networked mobile robots that jointly satisfies high-level spatial-temporal objectives (STL) and optimizes communication quality (STREL). The approach uses a two-layer hierarchical MPC with mixed-integer linear constraints, and is the first to synthesize controllers for STREL specifications.
Control and communication are often tightly coupled in motion planning of networked mobile robots, due to the fact that robotic motions will affect the overall communication quality, and the quality of service (QoS) of the communication among the robots will in turn affect their coordination performance. In this paper, we propose a control theoretical motion planning framework for a team of networked mobile robots in order to accomplish high-level spatial and temporal motion objectives while optimizing communication QoS. Desired motion specifications are formulated as Signal Temporal Logic (STL), whereas the communication performances to be optimized are captured by recently proposed Spatial Temporal Reach and Escape Logic (STREL) formulas. Both the STL and STREL specifications are encoded as mixed integer linear constraints posed on the system and/or environment state variables of the mobile robot network, where satisfactory control strategies can be computed by exploiting a distributed model predictive control (MPC) approach. To the best of the authors' knowledge, we are the first to study controller synthesis for STREL specifications. A two-layer hierarchical MPC procedure is proposed to efficiently solve the problem, whose soundness and completeness are formally ensured. The effectiveness of the proposed framework is validated by simulation examples.