A Hierarchical Hybrid Architecture for Mission-Oriented Robot Control

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-03413-3_26In this work is presented a general architecture for a multi physical agent network system based on the coordination and the behaviour management. The system is organised in a hierarchical structure where are distinguished the individual agent actions and the collective ones linked to the whole agent network. Individual actions are also organised in a hybrid layered system that take advantages from reactive and deliberative control. Sensing system is involved as well in the behaviour architecture improving the information acquisition performance.This work has been partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under the CICYT project Mission Based Control (COBAMI): DPI2011-28507-C02-02, under coordinated project High Integrity Partitioned Embedded Systems (Hi-PartES): TIN2011-28567-C03-03, and under the collaborative research project supported by the European Union MultiPARTES Project: FP7-ICT 287702. 2011-14.Muñoz Alcobendas, M.; Munera Sánchez, E.; Blanes Noguera, F.; Simó Ten, JE. (2013). A Hierarchical Hybrid Architecture for Mission-Oriented Robot Control. En ROBOT2013: First Iberian Robotics Conference: Advances in Robotics, Vol. 1. Springer. 363-380. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-03413-3_26S363380Aragues, R.: Consistent data association in multi-robot systems with limited communications. 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Supervisory control of fuzzy discrete event systems with applications to mobile robotics

Fuzzy Discrete Event Systems (FDES) were proposed in the literature for modeling and control of a class of event driven and asynchronous dynamical systems that are affected by deterministic uncertainties and vagueness on their representations. In contrast to classical crisp Discrete Event Systems (DES), which have been explored to a sufficient extent in the past, an in-depth study of FDES is yet to be performed, and their feasible real-time application areas need to be further identified. This research work intends to address the supervisory control problem of FDES broadly, while formulating new knowledge in the area. Moreover, it examines the possible applications of these developments in the behavior-based mobile robotics domain. An FDES-based supervisory control framework to facilitate the behavior-based control of a mobile robot is developed at first. The proposed approach is modular in nature and supports behavior integration without making state explosion. Then, this architecture is implemented in simulation as well as in real-time on a mobile robot moving in unstructured environments, and the feasibility of the approach is validated. A general decentralized supervisory control theory of FDES is then established for better information association and ambiguity management in large-scale and distributed systems, while providing less complexity of control computation. Furthermore, using the proposed architecture, simulation and real-time experiments of a tightly-coupled multi-robot object manipulation task are performed. The results are compared with centralized FDES-based and decentralized DES-based approaches. -- A decentralized modular supervisory control theory of FDES is then established for complex systems having a number of modules that are concurrently operating and also containing multiple interactions. -- Finally, a hierarchical supervisory control theory of FDES is established to resolve the control complexity of a large-scale compound system by modularizing the system vertically and assigning multi-level supervisor hierarchies. As a proof-of-concept example to the established theory, a mobile robot navigation problem is discussed. This research work will contribute to the literature by developing novel knowledge and related theories in the areas of decentralized, modular and hierarchical supervisory control of FDES. It also investigates the applicability of these contributions in the mobile robotics arena

An intelligent robotic framework for automated assembly

Recent applications of robots for industrial automation have shown significant improvement in manufacturing processes in terms of reducing labor participation, enhancing flexibility, efficiency and quality of the products. However, most applications are limited to point-to-point and noninteractive operations in which the availability of a highly structured setup is a prerequisite. This prompts the vast emergency of researches on intelligent robotics that are aimed to improve the adaptability, flexibility and dexterity so as to enhance the intelligence of industrial robots. This paper investigates the designs of intelligent robotic systems and discusses the proposed criteria required to achieve an intelligent robotic system. A proposed conceptual framework for robotic assembly is then presented that contains two main parts, namely, a robotic state recognizer and a control strategy generator. In addition to these two components, the integration of compliant motion control into the framework will be described. An example of using the proposed framework to develop a robotic assembly system is given.published_or_final_versio

A Framework for Coordinated Control of Multi-Agent Systems

Multi-agent systems represent a group of agents that cooperate to solve common tasks in a dynamic environment. Multi-agent control systems have been widely studied in the past few years. The control of multi-agent systems relates to synthesizing control schemes for systems which are inherently distributed and composed of multiple interacting entities. Because of the wide applications of multi-agent theories in large and complex control systems, it is necessary to develop a framework to simplify the process of developing control schemes for multi-agent systems. In this study, a framework is proposed for the distributed control and coordination of multi-agent systems. In the proposed framework, the control of multi-agent systems is regarded as achieving decentralized control and coordination of agents. Each agent is modeled as a Coordinated Hybrid Agent (CHA) which is composed of an intelligent coordination layer and a hybrid control layer. The intelligent coordination layer takes the coordination input, plant input and workspace input. After processing the coordination primitives, the intelligent coordination layer outputs the desired action to the hybrid layer. In the proposed framework, we describe the coordination mechanism in a domain-independent way, as simple abstract primitives in a coordination rule base for certain dependency relationships between the activities of different agents. The intelligent coordination layer deals with the planning, coordination, decision-making and computation of the agent. The hybrid control layer of the proposed framework takes the output of the intelligent coordination layer and generates discrete and continuous control signals to control the overall process. In order to verify the feasibility of the proposed framework, experiments for both heterogeneous and homogeneous Multi-Agent Systems (MASs) are implemented. In addition, the stability of systems modeled using the proposed framework is also analyzed. The conditions for asymptotic stability and exponential stability of a CHA system are given. In order to optimize a Multi-Agent System (MAS), a hybrid approach is proposed to address the optimization problem for a MAS modeled using the CHA framework. Both the event-driven dynamics and time-driven dynamics are included for the formulation of the optimization problem. A generic formula is given for the optimization of the framework. A direct identification algorithm is also discussed to solve the optimization problem

Formal Synthesis of Controllers for Safety-Critical Autonomous Systems: Developments and Challenges

In recent years, formal methods have been extensively used in the design of autonomous systems. By employing mathematically rigorous techniques, formal methods can provide fully automated reasoning processes with provable safety guarantees for complex dynamic systems with intricate interactions between continuous dynamics and discrete logics. This paper provides a comprehensive review of formal controller synthesis techniques for safety-critical autonomous systems. Specifically, we categorize the formal control synthesis problem based on diverse system models, encompassing deterministic, non-deterministic, and stochastic, and various formal safety-critical specifications involving logic, real-time, and real-valued domains. The review covers fundamental formal control synthesis techniques, including abstraction-based approaches and abstraction-free methods. We explore the integration of data-driven synthesis approaches in formal control synthesis. Furthermore, we review formal techniques tailored for multi-agent systems (MAS), with a specific focus on various approaches to address the scalability challenges in large-scale systems. Finally, we discuss some recent trends and highlight research challenges in this area

Multi-behaviors coordination controller design with enzymatic numerical P systems for robots

Membrane computing models are parallel and distributed natural computing models. These models are often referred to as P systems. This paper proposes a novel multi-behaviors coordination controller model using enzymatic numerical P systems for autonomous mobile robots navigation in unknown environments. An environment classifier is constructed to identify different environment patterns in the maze-like environment and the multi-behavior coordination controller is constructed to coordinate the behaviors of the robots in different environments. Eleven sensory prototypes of local environments are presented to design the environment classifier, which needs to memorize only rough information , for solving the problems of poor obstacle clearance and sensor noise. A switching control strategy and multi-behaviors coordinator are developed without detailed environmental knowledge and heavy computation burden, for avoiding the local minimum traps or oscillation problems and adapt to the unknown environments. Also, a serial behaviors control law is constructed on the basis of Lyapunov stability theory aiming at the specialized environment, for realizing stable navigation and avoiding actuator saturation. Moreover, both environment classifier and multi-behavior coordination controller are amenable to the addition of new environment models or new behaviors due to the modularity of the hierarchical architecture of P systems. The simulation of wheeled mobile robots shows the effectiveness of this approach

Integration of low-cost supervisory mobile robots in domestic wireless sensor networks

This paper presents a communication interface between supervisory low-cost mobile robots and domestic Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) based on the Zig Bee protocol from different manufacturers. The communication interface allows control and communication with other network devices using the same protocol. The robot can receive information from sensor devices (temperature, humidity, luminosity) and send commands to actuator devices (lights, shutters, thermostats) from different manufacturers. The architecture of the system, the interfaces and devices needed to establish the communication are described in the paper