Multi-robot task allocation for safe planning against stochastic hazard dynamics

This paper considers the problem of multi-robot safe mission planning in uncertain dynamic environments. This problem arises in several applications including safety-critical exploration, surveillance, and emergency rescue missions. Computation of a multi-robot optimal control policy is challenging not only because of the complexity of incorporating dynamic uncertainties while planning, but also because of the exponential growth in problem size as a function of number of robots. Leveraging recent works obtaining a tractable safety maximizing plan for a single robot, we propose a scalable two-stage framework to solve the problem at hand. Specifically, the problem is split into a low-level single-agent planning problem and a high-level task allocation problem. The low-level problem uses an efficient approximation of stochastic reachability for a Markov decision process to handle the dynamic uncertainty. The task allocation, on the other hand, is solved using polynomial-time forward and reverse greedy heuristics. The multiplicative safety objective of our multi-robot safe planning problem allows decoupling in order to implement the greedy heuristics through a distributed auction-based approach. Moreover, by leveraging the properties of this safety objective function, we ensure provable performance bounds on the safety of the approximate solutions proposed by these two heuristics.