A Framework for Task Planning in Heterogeneous Multi Robot Systems based on Robot Capabilities

In heterogeneous multi-robot teams, robustness and flexibility are increased by the diversity of the robots, each contributing different capabilities. Yet platform independence is desirable when planning actions for the various robots. We propose a platform-independent model of robot capabilities which we use as a planning domain. We extend existing planning techniques to support two requirements: generating new objects during planning; and, required concurrency of actions due to data flow which can be cyclic. The first requires online action instantiation, the second a small extension of the Planning Domain Definition Language (PDDL): allowing predicates in continuous effects. We evaluate the planner on benchmark domains and present results on an example object transportation task in simulation.