Application of Supervisory Control Theory to Swarms of e-puck and Kilobot Robots

At present, most of the source code controlling swarm robotic systems is developed in an ad-hoc manner. This can make it difficult to maintain these systems and to guarantee that they will accomplish the desired behaviour. Formal approaches can help to solve these issues. However, they do not usually guarantee that the final source code will match the modelled specification. To address this problem, our research explores the application of formal approaches to both synthesise high-level controllers and automatically generate control software for a swarm of robots. The formal approach used in this paper is supervisory control theory. The approach is successfully validated in two experiments using up to 42 Kilobot robots and up to 26 e-puck robots.

[1]  W. M. Wonham,et al.  The control of discrete event systems , 1989 .

[2]  A. B. Leal,et al.  Local Modular Supervisory Implementation in Microcontroller , 2012 .

[3]  Jing Liu,et al.  Ladder logic implementation of Ramadge-Wonham supervisory controller , 2002, Sixth International Workshop on Discrete Event Systems, 2002. Proceedings..

[4]  P. Ramadge,et al.  Modular Supervisory Control of Discrete Event Systems , 1988 .

[5]  Mauro Birattari,et al.  Property-driven design for swarm robotics , 2012, AAMAS.

[6]  Diana F. Spears,et al.  Reconfigurable robot teams: modeling and supervisory control , 2004, IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology.

[7]  P. Ramadge,et al.  Supervisory control of a class of discrete event processes , 1987 .

[8]  Ali Yalcin,et al.  Dynamic Task Allocation in Cooperative Robot Teams , 2009 .

[9]  Eliseo Ferrante,et al.  Swarm robotics: a review from the swarm engineering perspective , 2013, Swarm Intelligence.

[10]  Alcherio Martinoli,et al.  Modeling Swarm Robotic Systems: a Case Study in Collaborative Distributed Manipulation , 2004, Int. J. Robotics Res..

[11]  Kimon P. Valavanis,et al.  Optimized task allocation in cooperative robot teams , 2009, 2009 17th Mediterranean Conference on Control and Automation.

[12]  M.H. de Queiroz,et al.  Synthesis and implementation of local modular supervisory control for a manufacturing cell , 2002, Sixth International Workshop on Discrete Event Systems, 2002. Proceedings..

[13]  Wang Zhao-an,et al.  Modular Supervisory Control of Discrete-event Systems Based on State Tree Structures , 2013 .

[14]  Radhika Nagpal,et al.  Kilobot: A low cost scalable robot system for collective behaviors , 2012, 2012 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[15]  Clare Dixon,et al.  Towards Temporal Verification of Emergent Behaviours in Swarm Robotic Systems , 2011, TAROS.

[16]  Francesco Mondada,et al.  The e-puck, a Robot Designed for Education in Engineering , 2009 .

[17]  M.H. de Queiroz,et al.  Modular control of composed systems , 2000, Proceedings of the 2000 American Control Conference. ACC (IEEE Cat. No.00CH36334).

[18]  James A. Yorke,et al.  No evidence of an association between mitochondrial DNA variants and osteoarthritis in 7393 cases and 5122 controls , 2012, Annals of the rheumatic diseases.

[19]  Marcelo da Silva Hounsell,et al.  PLC-Based Implementation of Local Modular Supervisory Control for Manufacturing Systems , 2012 .

[20]  Kerstin Eder,et al.  Symmetry Reduction Enables Model Checking of More Complex Emergent Behaviours of Swarm Navigation Algorithms , 2015, TAROS.