Robust Multi-Agent Coordination from CaTL+ Specifications

TL;DR

This paper introduces CaTL+, an expressive logic for multi-agent systems with continuous workspace semantics, and develops a robust control synthesis method to ensure specifications are met effectively.

Contribution

We extend the existing CaTL logic to CaTL+ with enhanced expressivity and robustness metrics, and propose a novel two-step optimization approach for control synthesis.

Findings

CaTL+ is more expressive than CaTL.

Exponential robustness improves control synthesis.

Simulation confirms effectiveness of the approach.

Abstract

We consider the problem of controlling a heterogeneous multi-agent system required to satisfy temporal logic requirements. Capability Temporal Logic (CaTL) was recently proposed to formalize such specifications for deploying a team of autonomous agents with different capabilities and cooperation requirements. In this paper, we extend CaTL to a new logic CaTL+, which is more expressive than CaTL and has semantics over a continuous workspace shared by all agents. We define two novel robustness metrics for CaTL+: the traditional robustness and the exponential robustness. The latter is sound, differentiable almost everywhere and eliminates masking, which is one of the main limitations of the traditional robustness metric. We formulate a control synthesis problem to maximize CaTL+ robustness and propose a two-step optimization method to solve this problem. Simulation results are included to illustrate the increased expressivity of CaTL+ and the efficacy of the proposed control synthesis approach.