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Main Authors: Kundu, Tanmoy, Rafaeli, Moshe, Gulyaev, Anton, Indelman, Vadim
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.05962
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author Kundu, Tanmoy
Rafaeli, Moshe
Gulyaev, Anton
Indelman, Vadim
author_facet Kundu, Tanmoy
Rafaeli, Moshe
Gulyaev, Anton
Indelman, Vadim
contents In multi-robot systems, ensuring safe and reliable decision making under uncertain conditions demands robust multi-robot belief space planning (MR-BSP) algorithms. While planning with multiple robots, each robot maintains a belief over the state of the environment and reasons how the belief would evolve in the future for different possible actions. However, existing MR-BSP works have a common assumption that the beliefs of different robots are same at planning time. Such an assumption is often unrealistic as it requires prohibitively extensive and frequent data sharing capabilities. In practice, robots may have limited communication capabilities, and consequently beliefs of the robots can be different. Crucially, when the robots have inconsistent beliefs, the existing approaches could result in lack of coordination between the robots and may lead to unsafe decisions. In this paper, we present decentralized MR-BSP algorithms, with performance guarantees, for tackling this crucial gap. Our algorithms leverage the notion of action preferences. The base algorithm VerifyAC guarantees a consistent joint action selection by the cooperative robots via a three-step verification. When the verification succeeds, VerifyAC finds a consistent joint action without triggering a communication; otherwise it triggers a communication. We design an extended algorithm R-VerifyAC for further reducing the number of communications, by relaxing the criteria of action consistency. Another extension R-VerifyAC-simp builds on verifying a partial set of observations and improves the computation time significantly. The theoretical performance guarantees are corroborated with simulation results in discrete setting. Furthermore, we formulate our approaches for continuous and high-dimensional state and observation spaces, and provide experimental results for active multi-robot visual SLAM with real robots.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2403_05962
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Action-Consistent Decentralized Belief Space Planning with Inconsistent Beliefs and Limited Data Sharing: Framework and Simplification Algorithms with Formal Guarantees
Kundu, Tanmoy
Rafaeli, Moshe
Gulyaev, Anton
Indelman, Vadim
Robotics
In multi-robot systems, ensuring safe and reliable decision making under uncertain conditions demands robust multi-robot belief space planning (MR-BSP) algorithms. While planning with multiple robots, each robot maintains a belief over the state of the environment and reasons how the belief would evolve in the future for different possible actions. However, existing MR-BSP works have a common assumption that the beliefs of different robots are same at planning time. Such an assumption is often unrealistic as it requires prohibitively extensive and frequent data sharing capabilities. In practice, robots may have limited communication capabilities, and consequently beliefs of the robots can be different. Crucially, when the robots have inconsistent beliefs, the existing approaches could result in lack of coordination between the robots and may lead to unsafe decisions. In this paper, we present decentralized MR-BSP algorithms, with performance guarantees, for tackling this crucial gap. Our algorithms leverage the notion of action preferences. The base algorithm VerifyAC guarantees a consistent joint action selection by the cooperative robots via a three-step verification. When the verification succeeds, VerifyAC finds a consistent joint action without triggering a communication; otherwise it triggers a communication. We design an extended algorithm R-VerifyAC for further reducing the number of communications, by relaxing the criteria of action consistency. Another extension R-VerifyAC-simp builds on verifying a partial set of observations and improves the computation time significantly. The theoretical performance guarantees are corroborated with simulation results in discrete setting. Furthermore, we formulate our approaches for continuous and high-dimensional state and observation spaces, and provide experimental results for active multi-robot visual SLAM with real robots.
title Action-Consistent Decentralized Belief Space Planning with Inconsistent Beliefs and Limited Data Sharing: Framework and Simplification Algorithms with Formal Guarantees
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.05962