Scaling Safe Multi-Agent Control for Signal Temporal Logic Specifications

Purdue University

Abstract

Existing methods for safe multi-agent control using logic specifications like Signal Temporal Logic (STL) often face scalability issues. This is because they rely either on single-agent perspectives or on Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP)-based planners, which are complex to optimize. These methods have proven to be computationally expensive and inefficient when dealing with a large number of agents.

To address these limitations, we present a new scalable approach to multi-agent control in this setting. Our method treats the relationships between agents using a graph structure rather than in terms of a single-agent perspective. Moreover, it combines a multi-agent collision avoidance controller with a Graph Neural Network (GNN) based planner, models the system in a decentralized fashion, and trains on STL-based objectives to generate safe and efficient plans for multiple agents, thereby optimizing the satisfaction of complex temporal specifications while also facilitating multi-agent collision avoidance. Our experiments show that our approach significantly outperforms existing methods that use a state-of-the-art MILP-based planner in terms of scalability and performance

Video

Real World Demonstration

Demo on 5 DJI Tello Edu drones.

DubinsCar Environment, Sequence of 3 goals

GNN-ODE (Ours), 8 agents

3x speed

GNN-ODE (Ours) , 32 agents

3x speed

STLPY, 8 agents

3x speed

STLPY , 32 agents

3x speed

BibTeX

@inproceedings{
      eappen2024scaling,
      title={Scaling Safe Multi-Agent Control for Signal Temporal Logic Specifications},
      author={Joe Eappen and Zikang Xiong and Dipam Patel and Aniket Bera and Suresh Jagannathan},
      booktitle={8th Annual Conference on Robot Learning},
      year={2024},
      url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=N1K4B8N3n1}
      }