Representation and execution of plan sequences for multi-agent systems

Integration of planning and execution for single-agent systems has received considerable attention and numerous interesting approaches have been proposed. This is not the case for multi-agent systems, however. We describe one approach to representing joint team activities using a finite state machine augmented with synchronization primitives for orchestration of group activities. This representation encodes a sequence of activities that can be distributed across a team of robots and executed in a coordinated manner. We then show how such a representation can be mapped onto a behavior-based formalism for execution, as supported by a distributed, multi-robot control architecture, CAMPOUT. We demonstrate the proposed mechanisms within the context of a challenging task, where two rovers collectively carry an extended container over rough terrain.