Fast Distributed Multi-agent Plan Execution with Dynamic Task Assignment and Scheduling
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Williams_FastDistributed.pdf
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Author(s)
Williams, Brian Charles
Shah, Julie A.
Conrad, Patrick Raymond
Date Issued
September 2009
Journal
19th International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling
Publisher
American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics
Citation
Shah, Julie A., Patrick R. Conrad, and Brian C. Williams. "Fast Distributed Multi-agent Plan Execution with Dynamic Task Assignment and Scheduling." 19th International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling, September 19-23, 2009, Thessaloniki, Greece.
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
An essential quality of a good partner is her responsiveness to other team members. Recent work in dynamic plan execution exhibits elements of this quality through the ability to adapt to the temporal uncertainties of others agents and the environment. However, a good teammate also has the ability to adapt on-the-fly through task assignment. We generalize the framework of dynamic execution to perform plan execution with dynamic task assignment as well as scheduling. This paper introduces Chaski, a multi-agent executive for scheduling temporal plans with online task assignment. Chaski enables an agent to dynamically update its plan in response to disturbances in task assignment and the schedule of other agents. The agent then uses the updated plan to choose, schedule and execute actions that are guaranteed to be temporally consistent and logically valid within the multi-agent plan. Chaski is made efficient through an incremental algorithm that compactly encodes all scheduling policies for all possible task assignments. We apply Chaski to perform multi-manipulator coordination using two Barrett Arms within the authors' hardware testbed. We empirically demonstrate up to one order of magnitude improvements in execution latency and solution compactness compared to prior art.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics
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