Reconfigurable robot teams: modeling and supervisory control

Teams of land-based, airborne, or submerged robots constitute a new breed of robotic systems for which the issue of controlled behavior arises naturally. In this brief, we model the dynamics of the robot team in the discrete-event system (DES) framework and design a reconfigurable system that can handle situations in which robot units may switch offline. In particular, we exploit the dichotomy between controllable and uncontrollable behavior to synthesize a supervisor using only controllable events, but also one whose structure adapts to uncontrollable events. This brief presents a novel method based on learning and verification for restoring supervision as well as behavioral assurance of the team.