PLUMMRS: A collection of Plan Ledgers and Unified Maps for Multi-Robot Safety

In direct response to NASArsquo;s need for perception systems for interior environment monitoring, modeling, and navigation and for operational subsystems that increase robot autonomy, TRACLabs proposes to create a collection of software components that will facilitate sharing of environmental and internal state information to enable safe, efficient navigation and manipulation tasks by heterogeneous robot teams working in a shared workspace. We call this software collection PLUMMRS (A Collection of Plan Ledgersnbsp;and Unified Maps for Multi-Robot Safety). The goal of PLUMMRS is to provide simple APIs for existing single-agent planning and execution systems to leverage. This will allow previously individualistic robots to be used safely in multi-agent contexts. That is, PLUMMRS can be used by any individual robot in a group of robots to contribute to, and benefit from, a unified model of not only geometric and semantic perception data but also of expected and currently executing motion- and task-level plan data.PLUMMRS is not a planning framework, as each robot is expected to have its own ldquo;black-boxrdquo; motion- and task-planning capabilities; however, PLUMMRS can be used by both motion- and task-planning amp; control systems as (1) an oracle of shared knowledge, (2) a safety monitor based on the shared knowledge representation, and (3) an arbiter (and eventually a full scheduler) that attempts to loosely coordinate the short-term and long-term desires proposed by all individual robots, which are trying to independently complete their tasks while sharing geometric space and physical resources.