PLUMMRS: Towards Safe Multi-robot Task Planning and Execution

Abstract

As space exploration moves farther from Earth, robotics will play an ever-increasing role in NASA’s upcoming missions. Farther scenarios present new challenges, such as the absence or a very limited presence of human supervision for long periods of time. Spacecraft will have to be more dependent on automation and robotic agents to perform maintenance and repair tasks. Rather than having robots work side by side with humans, robots will have to work side by side with each other. In response to these needs, this chapter presents PLUMMRS (A Collection of Plan Ledgers and Unified Maps for Multi-Robot Safety), a software framework that facilitates sharing of environmental and internal state information to enable safe, efficient navigation and manipulation tasks by heterogeneous robot teams working in a shared workspace. 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. This chapter describes PLUMMRS architecture and a prototype implementation, showcasing its utility in scenarios such as the ISS with a small team of robots involving 2 Astrobees and a Robonaut, performing both colocated and collaborative tasks.