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Ensuring mission success for multi-robot systems operating in unpredictable environments requires robust mechanisms to react to unpredictable events, such as robot failures, by adapting plans in real-time. Adaptive mechanisms are especially needed for large teams deployed in areas with unreliable network infrastructure, for which centralized control is impractical and where network segmentation is frequent. This paper advances the state of the art by proposing a field-based runtime task replanning approach grounded in aggregate programming. Through this paradigm, the mission and the environment are represented by continuously evolving fields, enabling robots to make decentralized decisions and collectively adapt the ongoing plan. We compare our approach with a simple late-stage replanning strategy and an oracle centralized continuous replanner. We provide experimental evidence that the proposed approach achieves performance close to the oracle if the communication range is sufficient, while significantly outperforming the baseline even under sparse communication. Additionally, we show that the approach can scale well with the number of robots.

Multi-Robot Systems (MRSs) play a crucial role in several fields, including industrial automation, precision agriculture, and urban search and rescue, by enhancing efficiency and operational capabilities. One of the main challenges in these systems is the efficient allocation of tasks, known as Multi-Robot Task Allocation (MRTA). This paper focuses on a particularly complex configuration of MRTA that involves Multi-Task (MT) Robots capable of performing multiple tasks simultaneously, Multi-Robot (MR) Tasks that require coordinated efforts from several robots, and Time-extended Assignments (TA) that demand extended duration scheduling. Despite notable advancements in this area, the MT-MR-TA configuration remains underexplored. Existing research often fails to address the specific challenges associated with coordinating and scheduling these complex tasks. This paper aims to fill this gap by introducing new computational models based on Integer Linear Programming (ILP) and Constraint Programming (CP). These models are purposefully designed to formalize and tackle the intricate dynamics of MT-MR-TA, offering a structured approach to solve this multidimensional optimization problem. We rigorously evaluate these models for their effectiveness using advanced, general-purpose solvers across various instances, with a focus on model scalability, solver efficiency, and overall solution quality.

Collaborative human-robot teams enhance efficiency and adaptability in manufacturing, but task scheduling in mixed-agent systems remains challenging due to the uncertainty of task execution times and the need for synchronization of agent actions. Existing task allocation models often rely on deterministic assumptions, limiting their effectiveness in dynamic environments. We propose a stochastic scheduling framework that models uncertainty through probabilistic makespan estimates, using convolutions and stochastic max operators for realistic performance evaluation. Our approach employs meta-heuristic optimization to generate executable schedules aligned with human preferences and system constraints. It features a novel deadlock detection and repair mechanism to manage cross-schedule dependencies and prevent execution failures. This framework offers a robust, scalable solution for real-world human-robot scheduling in uncertain, interdependent task environments.

The efficiency of collaborative mobile robot applications is influenced by the inherent uncertainty introduced by humans' presence and active participation. This uncertainty stems from the dynamic nature of the working environment, various external factors, and human performance variability. The observed makespan of an executed plan will deviate from any deterministic estimate. This raises questions about whether a calculated plan is optimal given uncertainties, potentially risking failure to complete the plan within the estimated timeframe. This research addresses a collaborative task planning problem for a mobile robot serving multiple humans through tasks such as providing parts and fetching assemblies. To account for uncertainties in the durations needed for a single robot and multiple humans to perform different tasks, a probabilistic modeling approach is employed, treating task durations as random variables. The developed task planning algorithm considers the modeled uncertainties while searching for the most efficient plans. The outcome is a set of the best plans, where no plan is better than the other in terms of stochastic dominance. Our proposed methodology offers a systematic framework for making informed decisions regarding selecting a plan from this set, considering the desired risk level specific to the given operational context.

As Multi-Robot Systems (MRS) become more affordable and computing capabilities grow, they provide significant advantages for complex applications such as environmental monitoring, underwater inspections, or space exploration. However, accounting for potential communication loss or the unavailability of communication infrastructures in these application domains remains an open problem. Much of the applicable MRS research assumes that the system can sustain communication through proximity regulations and formation control or by devising a framework for separating and adhering to a predetermined plan for extended periods of disconnection. The latter technique enables an MRS to be more efficient, but breakdowns and environmental uncertainties can have a domino effect throughout the system, particularly when the mission goal is intricate or time-sensitive. To deal with this problem, our proposed framework has two main phases: i) a centralized planner to allocate mission tasks by rewarding intermittent rendezvous between robots to mitigate the effects of the unforeseen events during mission execution, and ii) a decentralized replanning scheme leveraging epistemic planning to formalize belief propagation and a Monte Carlo tree search for policy optimization given distributed rational belief updates. The proposed framework outperforms a baseline heuristic and is validated using simulations and experiments with aerial vehicles.

In this work, we investigate a task planning problem for assigning and planning a mobile robot team to jointly perform a kitting application with alternative task locations. To this end, the application is modeled as a Robot Task Scheduling Graph and the planning problem is modeled as a Mixed Integer Linear Program (MILP). We propose a heuristic approach to solve the problem with a practically useful performance in terms of scalability and computation time. The experimental evaluation shows that our heuristic approach is able to find efficient plans, in comparison with both optimal and non-optimal MILP solutions, in a fraction of the planning time.

The surge in the development and adoption of Electric Vehicles (EVs) globally is a trend many countries are paying close attention to. This inevitably means that a significant number of EV batteries will soon reach their End-of-Life (EoL). This looming issue reveals a notable challenge: there's currently a lack of sustainable strategies for managing Lithium-ion Batteries (LiBs) when they reach their EoL stage. The process of disassembling these battery packs is challenging due to their intricate design, involving several different materials and components integrated tightly for performance and safety. Consequently, effective disassembly and subsequent recycling procedures require highly specialized methods and equipment, and involve significant safety and health risks. Moreover, existing recycling technologies often fail to recover all valuable and potentially hazardous materials, leading to both economic and environmental loss. This paper provides an overview and analysis of possible challenges arising in the domain of automated battery disassembly and recycling of EV batteries that reached their EoL. We provide insight into the disassembly process as well as optimization of the disassembly sequence with the goal of minimizing the overall cost and environmental footprint.

Multi-agent systems can be prone to failures during the execution of a mission, depending on different circumstances, such as the harshness of the environment they are deployed in. As a result, initially devised plans for completing a mission may no longer be feasible, and a re-planning process needs to take place to re-allocate any pending tasks. There are two main approaches to solve the re-planning problem (i) global re-planning techniques using a centralized planner that will redo the task allocation with the updated world state and (ii) decentralized approaches that will focus on the local plan reparation, i.e., the re-allocation of those tasks initially assigned to the failed robots, better suited to a dynamic environment and less computationally expensive. In this paper, we propose a hybrid approach, named GLocal, that combines both strategies to exploit the benefits of both, while limiting their respective drawbacks. GLocal was compared to a planner-only, and an agent-only approach, under different conditions. We show that GLocal produces shorter mission make-spans as the number of tasks and failed agents increases, while also balancing the tradeoff between the number of messages exchanged and the number of requests to the planner.

With the rapidly growing use of Multi-Agent Systems (MASs), which can exponentially increase the system complexity, the problem of planning a mission for MASs became more intricate. In some MASs, human operators are still involved in various decision-making processes, including manual mission planning, which can be an ineffective approach for any non-trivial problem. Mission planning and re-planning can be represented as a combinatorial optimization problem. Computing a solution to these types of problems is notoriously difficult and not scalable, posing a challenge even to cutting-edge solvers. As time is usually considered an essential resource in MASs, automated solvers have a limited time to provide a solution. The downside of this approach is that it can take a substantial amount of time for the automated solver to provide a sub-optimal solution. In this work, we are interested in the interplay between a human operator and an automated solver and whether it is more efficient to let a human or an automated solver handle the planning and re-planning problems, or if the combination of the two is a better approach. We thus propose an experimental setup to evaluate the effect of having a human operator included in the mission planning and re-planning process. Our tests are performed on a series of instances with gradually increasing complexity and involve a group of human operators and a metaheuristic solver based on a genetic algorithm. We measure the effect of the interplay on both the quality and structure of the output solutions. Our results show that the best setup is to let the operator come up with a few solutions, before letting the solver improve them.

Applications are becoming increasingly data-intensive, requiring significant computational resources to meet their demand. Cloud-based services are insufficient to meet such demand, leading to a shift of the computation towards the devices closer to the edge of the network, leading to the emergence of an Edge-to-Cloud computing Continuum (E2C). An application can offload part of its computation toward the E2C. The allocation of applications to a set of available computing nodes is a challenging problem, as the allocation needs to take into account several factors, including the application requirements and demands as well as the optimization of the resource utilization in the E2C infrastructure and the minimization the CO2 footprint of the executed applications. Control and optimization techniques provide a vast array of tools for optimizing the Edge-to-Cloud continuum's management. This paper provides a mathematical formulation for the application offloading with specific requirements in the cloud computing domain. The problem is modeled as integer linear programming and constraint programming models and implemented in commercially available software. Finally, we provide the results of performed comparison between the two models.