Ergodic Specifications for Flexible Swarm Control: From User Commands to Persistent Adaptation
This work addresses the need for adaptable and user-responsive control systems for robotic swarms in dynamic environments, representing an incremental improvement in swarm robotics.
The paper tackles the problem of flexible swarm control by developing an end-to-end pipeline from user commands to decentralized ergodic coverage, enabling dynamic adaptation to environmental changes and user inputs. It validates the approach in simulations and real-world DARPA OFFSET field tests with a robotic swarm, demonstrating reliable control in real-time scenarios.
This paper presents a formulation for swarm control and high-level task planning that is dynamically responsive to user commands and adaptable to environmental changes. We design an end-to-end pipeline from a tactile tablet interface for user commands to onboard control of robotic agents based on decentralized ergodic coverage. Our approach demonstrates reliable and dynamic control of a swarm collective through the use of ergodic specifications for planning and executing agent trajectories as well as responding to user and external inputs. We validate our approach in a virtual reality simulation environment and in real-world experiments at the DARPA OFFSET Urban Swarm Challenge FX3 field tests with a robotic swarm where user-based control of the swarm and mission-based tasks require a dynamic and flexible response to changing conditions and objectives in real-time.