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oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/1530812023-12-01T03:48:55Zcom_1721.1_7582com_1721.1_7581col_1721.1_131023

Williams, Brian C. Pittman, Cameron W. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics 2023-11-30T21:12:27Z 2023-11-30T21:12:27Z 2023-09 2023-11-30T13:55:34.260Z https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/153081 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. S.M. Massachusetts Institute of Technology Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) Copyright retained by author(s) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Distributed Multi-Agent Decision Making Under Uncertain Communication Thesis application/pdf Master Master of Science in Aeronautics and Astronautics Publication unknown unknown <Publication xmlns="https://www.openaire.eu/cerif-profile/1.1/" id="242ac01c-e75f-4146-812a-72c08be61fee"> <Type xmlns="https://www.openaire.eu/cerif-profile/vocab/COAR_Publication_Types">http://purl.org/coar/resource_type/c_1843</Type> <Title>Distributed Multi-Agent Decision Making Under Uncertain Communication</Title> <PublishedIn> <Publication> </Publication> </PublishedIn> <PublicationDate>2023-09</PublicationDate> <Authors> <Author> <DisplayName>Pittman, Cameron W.</DisplayName> <Affiliation> <OrgUnit> </OrgUnit> </Affiliation> </Author> </Authors> <Editors> </Editors> <Publishers> <Publisher> <DisplayName>Massachusetts Institute of Technology</DisplayName> <OrgUnit /> </Publisher> </Publishers> <License>https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/</License> <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.</Abstract> <Access xmlns="http://purl.org/coar/access_right" > </Access> </Publication>