Context-Aware Modelling for Multi-Robot Systems Under Uncertainty

Formal models of multi-robot behaviour are fundamental to planning, simulation, and model checking techniques. However, existing models are invalidated by strong assumptions that fail to capture execution-time multi-robot behaviour, such as simplistic duration models or synchronisation constraints. In this paper we propose a novel multi-robot Markov automaton formulation which models asynchronous multi-robot execution in continuous time. Robot dynamics are captured using phase-type distributions over action durations. Moreover, we explicitly model the effects of robot interactions, as they are a key factor for the duration of action execution. We also present a scalable discrete-event simulator which yields realistic statistics over execution-time robot behaviour by sampling through the Markov automaton. We validate our model and simulator against a Gazebo simulation in a range of multi-robot navigation scenarios, demonstrating that our model accurately captures highlevel multi-robot behaviour.

Authors

• Charlie Street School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham
• Bruno Lacerda Stateful Robotics
• Michal Staniaszek University of Oxford
• Manuel Mühlig Honda Research Institute Europe GmbH
• Nick Hawes University of Oxford

Keywords

• Multi-robot systems
• Markov automata
• Discrete-event simulation