Distributed Multi-Agent Decision Making Under Uncertain Communication
Name
pittman-cameronp-sm-aeroastro-thesis.pdf
Description
Thesis PDF
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9.75 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
01ef0dc6de49c3517342d48de82246ea
Author(s)
Pittman, Cameron W.
Advisor(s)
Williams, Brian C.
Date Issued
September 2023
Publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Abstract
As space exploration accelerates and the number of robots and humans working in extreme environments grows with it, we must enact autonomous multi-agent coordination in order to safely operate in environments that are inherently hostile to communication. To the best of our knowledge, there are no multi-agent scheduling algorithms capable of independently reasoning over communication delay. A key gap that must be addressed is a single-agent scheduler capable of deciding when to act given uncertain observation, which can the form the basis for distributed multi-agent scheduling. Existing research has provided insights into temporal reasoning, namely modeling observation uncertainty and scheduling events with temporal constraints. There is both a need for deciding when to schedule events when there is uncertain observation delay, and a need to robustly coordinate between agents. Scheduling events in the face of uncertainty is a challenge due to the compounding uncertainties of uncontrollable exogenous events, unknown observation delay, and uncertain communication between agents. This thesis puts forth a series of contributions that culminates in the demonstration of a robust single-agent task executive that used our scheduler to coordinate in a multi-agent context despite observation delay. Doing so required insights in checking controllability of temporal constraints with uncertain delay, defining a scheduler that is robust to uncertain observation delay, integrating the scheduler in an existing high-level task executive, and a coordination strategy for multiple agents. We show that the scheduler exhibits the expected performance characteristics, and perform laboratory demonstrations of multi-agent execution with uncertain communication using a scenario inspired by human spaceflight.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics
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