Design and Implementation of Distributed Autonomous Coordinators for Cooperative Multi-Robot Systems

The paper presents a systematic method of the design of cooperative task planning and execution for complex robotic systems using multiple robots. Because individual robots can autonomously execute their dedicated tasks, in cooperative multi-robot systems, robotic activities should be designed as discrete event driven asynchronous, concurrent processes. Further, since robotic activities are hierarchically defined, control requirements should be specified in a proper and consistent manner on different levels of control abstraction. In this paper, Petri nets are adopted as a specification tool for task planning and execution by multiple robots. Based on place/transition Petri nets, control conditions for inter-robot cooperation with synchronized interaction are represented, and control rules to achieve distributed autonomous coordinated activities with synchronous and asynchronous communication are proposed. An implementation of net based control software on hierarchical and distributed architecture is presented for an example multi-robot cell, where the higher-level controller executes a global net model of task plan representing cooperative behaviors performed by the robots, and the parallel activities of the individual robots are synchronized through the transmission of requests and the reception of status between the associated lower-level local controllers.