Decision-making under uncertainty for multi-robot systems

Lacerda B, Gautier A, Rutherford A, Stephens A, Street C, Hawes N

In this overview paper, we present the work of the Goal-Oriented Long-Lived Systems Lab on multi-robot systems. We address multi-robot systems from a decision-making under uncertainty perspective, proposing approaches that explicitly reason about the inherent uncertainty of action execution, and how such stochasticity affects multi-robot coordination. To develop effective decision-making approaches, we take a special focus on (i) temporal uncertainty, in particular of action execution; (ii) the ability to provide rich guarantees of performance, both at a local (robot) level and at a global (team) level; and (iii) scaling up to systems with real-world impact. We summarise several pieces of work and highlight how they address the challenges above, and also hint at future research directions.

Keywords:

asynchronous execution

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Markov models

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decision-making under uncertainty

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multi-robot systems

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formal methods