Mission Planning and Execution Architecture for Robotic Systems Using BPMN

Multi-robot systems need expressive and adaptive mission modeling and execution architectures that general users can understand. This paper develops a mission modeling and execution architecture that provides expressive modeling capabilities via the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN). Flexible and dynamic mission execution is combined with dynamic resource allocation. The architecture is demonstrated via the simulation of a surveillance mission where several robots must visit and investigate many locations. The surveillance mission highlights key aspects of the expressibility and adaptability of the architecture.