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Frontiers of Information Technology & Electronic Engineering

ISSN 2095-9184 (print), ISSN 2095-9230 (online)

Decentralized runtime enforcement for robotic swarms

Abstract: Robotic swarms are usually designed in a bottom-up way, which can make robotic swarms vulnerable to environmental impact. It is particularly true for the widely used control mode of robotic swarms, where it is often the case that neither the correctness of the swarming tasks at the macro level nor the safety of the interaction among agents at the micro level can be guaranteed. To ensure that the behaviors are safe at runtime, it is necessary to take into account the property guard approaches for robotic swarms in uncertain environments. Runtime enforcement is an approach which can guarantee the given properties in system execution and has no scalability issue. Although some runtime enforcement methods have been studied and applied in different domains, they cannot effectively solve the problem of property enforcement on robotic swarm tasks at present. In this paper, an enforcement method is proposed on swarms which should satisfy multi-level properties in uncertain environments. We introduce a macro-micro property enforcing framework with the notion of agent shields and a discrete-time enforcing mechanism called D-time enforcing. To realize this method, a domain specification language and the corresponding enforcer synthesis algorithms are developed. We then apply the approach to enforce the properties of the simulated robotic swarm in the robotflocksim platform. We evaluate and show the effectiveness of the method with experiments on specific unmanned aerial vehicle swarm tasks.

Key words: Runtime enforcement, Multi-level property, D-time enforcement, Robotic swarm

Chinese Summary  <26> 机器人集群的去中心化运行时强制方法


胡驰1,董威1,杨永辉2,史浩1,邓霏2
1国防科技大学计算机学院,中国长沙市,410073
2中国工程物理研究院计算机应用研究所,中国绵阳市,621999

摘要:机器人系统设计通常是自下而上的,这种开发方式使机器人群体很容易受到环境影响。具体来说,目前广泛使用的集群控制模型不能保证宏观上群体任务的正确性,也不能保证微观上机器人节点间交互的安全性。因此,为确保机器人行为在运行时的安全性,有必要考虑机器人集群系统在不确定环境下的复杂性质。运行时强制技术能确保状态序列始终满足给定性质,并且避免状态爆炸的问题。虽然在其他领域出现了一些运行时强制的工作,但目前还不能解决机器人集群问题。本文通过引入宏观/微观性质强制框架、防护器以及一个离散时间的强制机制(discrete-time enforcement,D-time强制)解决该问题。论述了领域规约语言和强制器合成算法,然后,将此方法应用到一个机器人集群仿真工具robotflocksim中合成强制器。以无人机集群任务为例实现了该方法,并对实验效果进行讨论。

关键词组:运行时强制;多层级性质;D-time强制;机器人集群


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DOI:

10.1631/FITEE.2000203

CLC number:

TP311

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On-line Access:

2020-11-13

Received:

2020-04-30

Revision Accepted:

2020-09-20

Crosschecked:

2020-10-10

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