Distributed Hybrid Control Synthesis for Multi-Agent Systems from High-Level Specifications

Current control applications necessitate in many cases the consideration of systems with multiple interconnected components. These components/agents may need to fulfill high-level tasks at a discrete planning layer and also coupled constraints at the continuous control layer. Toward this end, the need for combined decentralized control at the continuous layer and planning at the discrete layer becomes apparent. While there are approaches that handle the problem in a top-down centralized manner, decentralized bottom-up approaches have not been pursued to the same extent. We present here some of our results for the problem of combined, hybrid control and task planning from high-level specifications for multi-agent systems in a bottom-up manner. In the first part, we present some initial results on extending the necessary notion of abstractions to multi-agent systems in a distributed fashion. We then consider a setup where agents are assigned individual tasks in the form of linear temporal logic (LTL) formulas and derive local task planning strategies for each agent. In the last part, the problem of combined distributed task planning and control under coupled continuous constraints is further considered.