A Decentralized Control Architecture to Achieve Synchronized Task Behaviors in Autonomous Cooperative Multi-Robot Systems

This chapter describes a method for designing decentralized simulation and control architecture for multiple robot systems based on the discrete event net models. Extended Petri nets are adopted as an effective tool to describe, design, and control cooperative behavior of multiple robots based on asynchronous, concurrent processes. By hierarchical decomposition of the net model of the overall system, global and local Petri net models are assigned to the upper level and the lower level controllers, respectively. For the lower level control, individual net models of robots are executed on separate local controllers. The unified net representation for cooperative control is also proposed. Overall control software is implemented and executed on a general hierarchical and distributed control architecture corresponding to the hardware structure of multiple robot systems.