With the increasing prevalence and diversity of robots interacting in the real world, there is need for flexible, on-the-fly planning and cooperation. Large Language Models are starting to be explored in a multimodal setup for communication, coordination, and planning in robotics. Existing approaches generally use a single agent building a plan, or have multiple homogeneous agents coordinating for a simple task. We present a decentralised, dialogical approach in which a team of agents with different abilities plans solutions through peer-to-peer and human-robot discussion. We suggest that argument-style dialogues are an effective way to facilitate adaptive use of each agent's abilities within a cooperative team. Two robots discuss how to solve a cleaning problem set by a human, define roles, and agree on paths they each take. Each step can be interrupted by a human advisor and agents check their plans with the human. Agents then execute this plan in the real world, collecting rubbish from people in each room. Our implementation uses text at every step, maintaining transparency and effective human-multi-robot interaction.
Virginia Tech（弗吉尼亚理工大学）；University of Maryland（马里兰大学）
Deploying a team of robots that can carefully coordinate their actions can make the entire system robust to individual failures. In this report, we review recent algorithmic development in making multi-robot systems robust to environmental uncertainties, failures, and adversarial attacks. We find the following three trends in the recent research in the area of multi-robot coordination: (1) resilient coordination to either withstand failures and/or attack or recover from failures/attacks; (2) risk-aware coordination to manage the trade-off risk and reward, where the risk stems due to environmen…
Safe and Socially Aware Multi-Robot Coordination in Multi-Human Social Care Settings
School of Computing and Communications, The Open University（奥本大学计算与通讯学院）；School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton（南安普顿大学电子与计算机科学学院）；School of Computer Science, University of Nottingham（诺丁汉大学计算机科学学院）
Czech Institute of Informatics, Robotics, and Cybernetics, Czech Technical University in Prague（捷克布拉格捷克技术大学信息学、机器人学与控制论研究所）；Czech Technical University in Prague（布拉格捷克技术大学）
In this chapter, we propose a novel approach for solving the coordination of a fleet of mobile robots, which consists of finding a set of collision-free trajectories for individual robots in the fleet. This problem is studied for several decades, and many approaches have been introduced. However, only a small minority is applicable in practice because of their properties - small computational requirement, producing solutions near-optimum, and completeness. The approach we present is based on a multi-robot variant of Rapidly Exploring Random Tree algorithm (RRT) for discrete environments and si…
Failure-Aware Multi-Robot Coordination for Resilient and Adaptive Target Tracking
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Drexel University（德雷塞尔大学电气与计算机工程系）；Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines, Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院机器人与智能机器研究所）；GRASP Lab, University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学GRASP实验室）
DeReCo: Decoupling Representation and Coordination Learning for Object-Adaptive Decentralized Multi-Robot Cooperative Grasping and Lifting
Division of Information Science, Graduate School of Science and Technology, Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST)（信息科学系，科学技术研究生院，科学与技术国立研究所（NAIST））；Department of Cognitive Robotics, Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, Delft University of Technology（认知机器人系，机械工程学院，代尔夫特理工大学）
Federated Single-Agent Robotics: Multi-Robot Coordination Without Intra-Robot Multi-Agent Fragmentation
School of Software, Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学软件学院）；School of Computer Science and Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学计算机科学与技术学院）；School of Mathematical and Computer Sciences, Heriot-Watt University, Malaysia Campus（赫瑞-沃顿大学马来西亚校区数学与计算机科学学院）；School of Future Science and Engineering, Soochow University（苏州大学未来科学与工程学院）
University of Maryland（马里兰大学）；University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）；Virginia Tech（弗吉尼亚理工大学）
Submodular maximization has been widely used in many multi-robot task planning problems including information gathering, exploration, and target tracking. However, the interplay between submodular maximization and communication is rarely explored in the multi-robot setting. In many cases, maximizing the submodular objective may drive the robots in a way so as to disconnect the communication network. Driven by such observations, in this paper, we consider the problem of maximizing submodular function with connectivity constraints. Specifically, we propose a problem called Communication-aware Su…
CoCoPlan: Adaptive Coordination and Communication for Multi-robot Systems in Dynamic and Unknown Environments
School of Advanced Manufacturing and Robotics, Peking University（北京大学先进制造与机器人学院）；Division of Natural and Applied Sciences, Duke Kunshan University（杜克昆山大学自然与应用科学系）
School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, KTH Royal Institute of Technology（瑞典皇家理工学院电气与计算机科学学院）
This paper investigates the online motion coordination problem for a group of mobile robots moving in a shared workspace, each of which is assigned a linear temporal logic specification. Based on the realistic assumptions that each robot is subject to both state and input constraints and can have only local view and local information, a fully distributed multi-robot motion coordination strategy is proposed. For each robot, the motion coordination strategy consists of three layers. An offline layer pre-computes the braking area for each region in the workspace, the controlled transition system,…
This paper investigates the online motion coordination problem for a group of mobile robots moving in a shared workspace. Based on the realistic assumptions that each robot is subject to both velocity and input constraints and can have only local view and local information, a fully distributed multi-robot motion coordination strategy is proposed. Building on top of a cell decomposition, a conflict detection algorithm is presented first. Then, a rule is proposed to assign dynamically a planning order to each pair of neighboring robots, which is deadlock-free. Finally, a two-step motion planning…
K-ARC: Adaptive Robot Coordination for Multi-Robot Kinodynamic Planning
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；Siebel School of Computing and Data Science（西贝尔计算与数据科学学院）；Texas A&M University（德克萨斯农工大学）；Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM)（墨西哥自治技术学院）
We enable efficient and effective coordination in unpredictable environments, i.e., in environments whose future evolution is unknown a priori and even adversarial. We are motivated by the future of autonomy that involves multiple robots coordinating in dynamic, unstructured, and adversarial environments to complete complex tasks such as target tracking, environmental mapping, and area monitoring. Such tasks are often modeled as submodular maximization coordination problems. We introduce the first submodular coordination algorithm with bounded tracking regret, i.e., with bounded suboptimality …
Sapienza University of Rome（罗马第一大学）；ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）
Teams of UGVs patrolling harsh and complex 3D environments can experience interference and spatial conflicts with one another. Neglecting the occurrence of these events crucially hinders both soundness and reliability of a patrolling process. This work presents a distributed multi-robot patrolling technique, which uses a two-level coordination strategy to minimize and explicitly manage the occurrence of conflicts and interference. The first level guides the agents to single out exclusive target nodes on a topological map. This target selection relies on a shared idleness representation and a c…
Max Planck Institute for Software Systems（马克斯·普朗克软件系统研究所）；Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）
We present a programming model and typing discipline for complex multi-robot coordination programming. Our model encompasses both synchronisation through message passing and continuous-time dynamic motion primitives in physical space. We specify \emph{continuous-time motion primitives} in an assume-guarantee logic that ensures compatibility of motion primitives as well as collision freedom. We specify global behaviour of programs in a \emph{choreographic} type system that extends multiparty session types with jointly executed motion primitives, predicated refinements, as well as a \emph{separa…
Indian Institute of Technology Bhubaneswar（布巴内斯瓦尔理工学院）；TCS Research（TCS研究院）；Wageningen University and Research（瓦赫宁根大学及研究中心）
An efficient communication mechanism forms the backbone for any multi-robot system to achieve fruitful collaboration and coordination. Limitation in the existing asynchronous transmission based strategies in fast dissemination and aggregation compels the designers to prune down such requirements as much as possible. This also restricts the possible application areas of mobile multi-robot systems. In this work, we introduce concurrent transmission based strategy as an alternative. Despite the commonly found difficulties in concurrent transmission such as microsecond level time synchronization, …
As one of the latest fields of interest in both academia and industry, quantum computing has garnered significant attention. Among various topics in quantum computing, variational quantum circuits (VQC) have been noticed for their ability to carry out quantum deep reinforcement learning (QRL). This paper verifies the potential of QRL, which will be further realized by implementing quantum multi-agent reinforcement learning (QMARL) from QRL, especially for Internet-connected autonomous multi-robot control and coordination in smart factory applications. However, the extension is not straightforw…
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University（弗吉尼亚理工学院暨州立大学）；Roma Tre University（罗马第三大学）
In this paper, we address the problem of stable coordinated motion in multi-robot systems with limited fields of view (FOVs). These problems arise naturally for multi-robot systems that interact based on sensing, such as our case study of multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) each equipped with several cameras that are used for detecting neighboring UAVs. In this context, our contributions are: i) first, we derive a framework for studying stable motion and distributed topology control for multi-robot systems with limited FOVs; and ii) Then, we provide experimental results in indoor and chal…
Efficient Coordination and Synchronization of Multi-Robot Systems Under Recurring Linear Temporal Logic
Department of Information Engineering, University of Padova（帕多瓦大学信息工程系）；Division of Decision and Control Systems, School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, KTH Royal Institute of Technology（皇家理工学院电气工程与计算机科学学院决策与控制系统系）
The hunter and gatherer approach copes with the problem of dynamic multi-robot task allocation, where tasks are unknowingly distributed over an environment. This approach employs two complementary teams of agents: one agile in exploring (hunters) and another dexterous in completing (gatherers) the tasks. Although this approach has been studied from the task planning point of view in our previous works, the multi-robot exploration and coordination aspects of the problem remain uninvestigated. This paper proposes a multi-robot exploration algorithm for hunters based on innovative notions of "exp…
Multi-Robot Coordination for Planning under Context Uncertainty
Collaborative Robotics and Intelligent Systems (CoRIS) Institute, Oregon State University（俄勒冈州立大学协作机器人与智能系统研究所）；Khoury College of Computer Sciences, Northeastern University（东北大学库里计算机科学学院）
