Petri Net Plans

Abstract

Programming the behavior of multi-robot systems is a challenging task which has a key role in developing effective systems in many application domains. In this paper, we present Petri Net Plans (PNPs), a language based on Petri Nets (PNs), which allows for intuitive and effective robot and multi-robot behavior design. PNPs are very expressive and support a rich set of features that are critical to develop robotic applications, including sensing, interrupts and concurrency. As a central feature, PNPs allow for a formal analysis of plans based on standard PN tools. Moreover, PNPs are suitable for modeling multi-robot systems and the developed behaviors can be executed in a distributed setting, while preserving the properties of the modeled system. PNPs have been deployed in several robotic platforms in different application domains. In this paper, we report three case studies, which address complex single robot plans, coordination and collaboration.

Sensor Robot Planning in Incomplete Environment

“…Compared to the former work in the literature [3][4][5]9], our paper does some tries to represent robot planning in incomplete environment, which is realized by divided the actions to two sorts, one is external action which the robot used to change itself and environment state, and the other is the sensing action which the robot used to sense the unknown environment state. The next work is to use hierarchical Petri net to represent robot planning to solve the state explosion problem.…”

“…Silva [4] converted the planning graph to the acylic Petri net to plan, but can not represent the incomplete state knowledge. Vittorio [5] introduced a method for robot planning based on Petri net, formally describing actions and the relations between the actions, but it lacks the formal description for the state including the environment state and robot state, can not generate automatically the action sequence to the goal, and also can not represent the incomplete knowledge.…”

Model-Based Design and Control of Distributed DNA-Based Systems by Petri Nets

“…We bridge the high-level abstraction into lowlevel biomolecular operation through a mathematical modeling language referred to as Petri Nets, which is a concurrent and discrete event-driven modeling language that has been used to describe the behaviors of many autonomous systems including task planning for single-robot or multi-robot systems. [28][29][30] It is preferable because of its capability to model concurrences and synchronization in a tangible formal de¯nition in addition to its easy-tounderstand graphical notation. Many applications, such as decision making and task scheduling, can be designed elegantly in this abstract model.…”

Petri Net Robotic Task Plan Representation: Modelling, Analysis and Execution

“…Work using Petri nets to design robotic tasks under temporal requirements, focusing also on the generation of real-time, error-free code can be found in (Montano et al, 2000). Petri net Plans were introduced in (Ziparo & Iocchi, 2006) for design and execution of task plans. However, these do not close the loop, i.e., do not consider the actual implications of the actions on the environment, focusing mostly on the design.…”