HULK: Large-scale Hierarchical Coordination under Continual and Uncertain Temporal Tasks

Abstract

Multi-agent systems can be extremely efficient when working concurrently and collaboratively, e.g., for delivery, surveillance, search and rescue. Coordination of such teams often involves two aspects: selecting appropriate subteams for different tasks in various areas, and coordinating agents in the subteams to execute the associated subtasks. Existing work often assumes that the tasks are static and known beforehand, where an integer program can be formulated and solved offline. However, in many applications, the team-wise tasks are generated online continually by external requests, and the amount of subtasks within each task is uncertain, e.g., the number of packages to deliver or victims to rescue. The aforementioned offline solution becomes inadequate as it would require constant re-computation for the whole team and global communication to broadcast the results. Thus, this work tackles the large-scale coordination problem under continual and uncertain temporal tasks, specified as temporal logic formulas over collaborative actions. The proposed hierarchical framework, HULK, consists of two interleaved layers: the rolling assignment of currently known tasks to subteams within a certain horizon, and the dynamic coordination within a subteam given the detected subtasks during online execution. Thus, coordination is performed hierarchically at different granularities and triggering conditions, improving computational efficiency and robustness. The method is validated rigorously over large-scale heterogeneous systems under various temporal tasks and environment uncertainties.