Tightly-coupled multi robot coordination using decentralized supervisory control of Fuzzy Discrete Event Systems

In this paper, we address the multi robot coordination problem of tightly-coupled task execution, using a formal decentralized supervisory control approach. A general architecture for decentralized supervisory control of Fuzzy Discrete Event Systems (FDES), which is capable of modeling asynchronous event driven systems with inherited uncertainties, is developed. This architecture is then incorporated for con trolling behavior-based mobile robots moving in unstructured environments while maintaining a fixed distance between each other, which resembles a tightly-coupled multi robot object manipulation task. The proposed approach is then successfully implemented in simulation with two mobile robots and a performance evaluation is also performed to investigate the validity of the proposed approach over the centralized and crisp Discrete Event System (DES) based approaches.