Composition of Constraints in Long Duration Autonomy

When robots are to be deployed over long time scales, optimality should take a backseat to “survivability”. In other words, it is more important that the robots do not experience mission-ending failures, such as collisions or complete depletion of their energy sources, rather than that they perform certain tasks as effectively as possible. For example, in the context of multi-agent robotics, we have a fairly good understanding of how to design coordinated control strategies for making teams of mobile robots achieve geometric objectives, such as assembling shapes or covering areas. But, what happens when these geometric objectives no longer matter all that much? In this talk, we consider this question of long duration autonomy for teams of robots that are deployed in an environment over a sustained period of time and that can be recruited to perform a number of different tasks in a distributed, safe, and provably correct manner. Survival will be encoded through Boolean composition of barrier functions. But, as these operations are non-differentiable, a non-smooth barrier function machinery is needed to manage the resulting complex, hybrid system dynamics. 

Composition of Constraints in Long Duration Autonomy

When robots are to be deployed over long time scales, optimality should take a backseat to “survivability”. In other words, it is more important that the robots do not experience mission-ending failures, such as collisions or complete depletion of their energy sources, rather than that they perform certain tasks as effectively as possible. For example, in the context of multi-agent robotics, we have a fairly good understanding of how to design coordinated control strategies for making teams of mobile robots achieve geometric objectives, such as assembling shapes or covering areas. But, what happens when these geometric objectives no longer matter all that much? In this talk, we consider this question of long duration autonomy for teams of robots that are deployed in an environment over a sustained period of time and that can be recruited to perform a number of different tasks in a distributed, safe, and provably correct manner. Survival will be encoded through Boolean composition of barrier functions. But, as these operations are non-differentiable, a non-smooth barrier function machinery is needed to manage the resulting complex, hybrid system dynamics.