Case study: delivery service

In this case study, we consider two robots that are meant to cooperate for a delivery service. Our control architecture is based on a three-level hierarchy:

  • on the lowest level of abstraction, we design continuous low-level controllers based on the nonlinear robot dynamics in order to implement elementary manoeuvres "go north", "go west" ..., "accelerate", etc.;

  • on an intermediate level of abstraction, we use l-complete approximations for the synthesis of a discrete supervisor that schedules manoeuvres in order to drive each individual robot from one target location (indicated by "1",...,"4") to another one;

  • the top-level supervisor implements cooperative behaviour while avoiding collisions.

In contrast to an ad-hoc solution -- that may very well come up with a similar hierarchical architecture -- our methods guarantee that the composition of the three levels of control indeed solve the overall problem: any delivery tasks issued (indicated within the center square) will be dispatched accordingly, while robots will not collide and pizzas get delivered.