Leveraging Heterogeneous Capabilities in Multi-Agent Systems for Environmental Conflict Resolution

TL;DR

This paper presents a high-level controller synthesis framework for heterogeneous multi-agent systems that enables agents to assist each other in resolving environmental conflicts and obstacles at runtime, ensuring safety and task completion.

Contribution

It introduces a novel reactive synthesis-based controller framework that leverages heterogeneous agent capabilities for real-time environmental conflict resolution.

Findings

Framework guarantees safety and task completion under environment assumptions

Successfully demonstrated on physical multi-agent robotic system

Effective in resolving obstacles using heterogeneous agent collaboration

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce a high-level controller synthesis framework that enables teams of heterogeneous agents to assist each other in resolving environmental conflicts that appear at runtime. This conflict resolution method is built upon temporal-logic-based reactive synthesis to guarantee safety and task completion under specific environment assumptions. In heterogeneous multi-agent systems, every agent is expected to complete its own tasks in service of a global team objective. However, at runtime, an agent may encounter un-modeled obstacles (e.g., doors or walls) that prevent it from achieving its own task. To address this problem, we employ the capabilities of other heterogeneous agents to resolve the obstacle. A controller framework is proposed to redirect agents with the capability of resolving the appropriate obstacles to the required target when such a situation is detected. Three case studies involving a bipedal robot Digit and a quadcopter are used to evaluate the controller performance in action. Additionally, we implement the proposed framework on a physical multi-agent robotic system to demonstrate its viability for real world applications.