Robot ecology: Constraint-based control design for long duration autonomy

Abstract Long duration autonomy considers robots that are deployed over long time scales. As a result, the robots’ ability to operate across changing environmental conditions and perform tasks that require more time to complete than what can be supported on a single battery charge, have implications for how the control design task should be approached. By drawing inspiration from ecology, which concerns itself with the strong coupling between organism and the environment it inhabits, we encode these “survival constraints” through Boolean compositions of multiple control barrier functions, and show how this construction supports long duration autonomy in the context of persistent environmental monitoring on a team of mobile robots.

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