Distributed Coordination of Multiple Robot Systems Based on Hierarchical Petri Net Models

The paper presents a systematic methodology for modeling multi-robot production tasks based on extended Petri nets. To overcome some difficulties in the modeling of complex discrete event systems with a large number of elements in basic Petri nets, extended high-level Petri nets are introduced based on condition-event Petri nets. The high-level net representation of the conceptual task flows and detailed control functions with a top-down refinement methodology can provide more synthetic specifications for consistent management and distributed coordination of multi-robot systems.