Cooperative tasking for deterministic specification automata

This paper proposes necessary and sufficient conditions for task decomposability with respect to an arbitrary finite number of agents. It is furthermore shown that fulfilling the decomposed local tasks by individual agents guarantees the satisfaction of the original global decomposable task. A divide-and-conquer approach for cooperative tasking among multi-agent systems is proposed. The basic idea is to decompose an assigned global specification (given as a deterministic automaton) into subtasks for individual concurrent agents such that the fulfillment of these subtasks by each individual agent leads to the satisfaction of the global specification as a team. A cooperative scenario involving three robots has been implemented to illustrate the proposed technique. This work provides insights into what kinds of tasks can be achieved distributively, which helps designers specify achievable global tasks for a group of agents and design necessary information sharing among each other for a particular task.