Dynamic routing of energy-aware vehicles with Temporal Logic Constraints

Abstract

This paper addresses a persistent vehicle routing problem, where a team of vehicles is required to achieve a task repetitively. The task is given as a Time-Window Temporal Logic (TWTL) formula defined over the environment. The fuel consumption of each vehicle is explicitly captured as a stochastic model. As vehicles leave the mission area for refueling, the number of vehicles may not always be sufficient to achieve the task. We propose a decoupled and efficient control policy to achieve the task or its minimal relaxation. We quantify the temporal relaxation of a TWTL formula and present an algorithm to minimize it. The proposed policy has two layers: 1) each vehicle decides when to refuel based on its remaining fuel, 2) a central authority plans the joint trajectories of the available vehicles to achieve a minimally relaxed task. We demonstrate the proposed approach via simulations and experiments involving a team of quadrotors that conduct persistent surveillance.