Distributed Multi-Agent Decision Making Under Uncertain Communication

As space exploration accelerates and the number of robots and humans working in extreme environments grows with it, we must enact autonomous multi-agent coordination in order to safely operate in environments that are inherently hostile to communication. To the best of our knowledge, there are no multi-agent scheduling algorithms capable of independently reasoning over communication delay. A key gap that must be addressed is a single-agent scheduler capable of deciding when to act given uncertain observation, which can the form the basis for distributed multi-agent scheduling. Existing research has provided insights into temporal reasoning, namely modeling observation uncertainty and scheduling events with temporal constraints. There is both a need for deciding when to schedule events when there is uncertain observation delay, and a need to robustly coordinate between agents. Scheduling events in the face of uncertainty is a challenge due to the compounding uncertainties of uncontrollable exogenous events, unknown observation delay, and uncertain communication between agents. This thesis puts forth a series of contributions that culminates in the demonstration of a robust single-agent task executive that used our scheduler to coordinate in a multi-agent context despite observation delay. Doing so required insights in checking controllability of temporal constraints with uncertain delay, defining a scheduler that is robust to uncertain observation delay, integrating the scheduler in an existing high-level task executive, and a coordination strategy for multiple agents. We show that the scheduler exhibits the expected performance characteristics, and perform laboratory demonstrations of multi-agent execution with uncertain communication using a scenario inspired by human spaceflight.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2023

Author dc:creator

• Pittman, Cameron W.

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Williams, Brian C.

Statement dc:rights

• Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
• Copyright retained by author(s)

Licence dc:rights.uri

• https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/153081

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/153081