Multi-Robot Planning Under Uncertainty

The demand for multi-robot systems is increasing, due to their performance, flexibility, and fault tolerance. Successful multi-robot deployments have been completed in fulfilment centres, fruit fields, and on roads. In each of these environments, robot behaviour is affected by the stochastic dynamics of the environment and the other robots, and so we require planning solutions that are robust to these sources of uncertainty. In this tutorial, we will explore a spectrum of multi-robot planning approaches which trade off between solution quality and scalability. These approaches differ in how they handle robot interactions during planning. We will also discuss modelling formalisms which capture multi-robot behaviour under different forms of uncertainty, such as temporal uncertainty, which affects robot action durations. This tutorial is accessible to anyone interested in deploying multi-robot systems in dynamic and uncertain environments.