Encapsulated path planning for abstraction-based control of multi-vehicle systems

We introduce an encapsulation approach to path planning for multi-vehicle control that permits other decision processes to work with simple, spatially-abstracted domain models, and partially or wholly ignore obstacles, observation uncertainty and vehicle dynamics. The encapsulation results in formal domain representations called patch models that generate path planning problems in two standard forms: patch realization and differential patch realization, that we formulate and address in this paper. We present enhancements to existing ways of partitioning the path planning problem, and also present enhancements for each component. Conditions are presented characterizing domains suitable for abstraction-based methods