Mobile Robot Networks for Environmental Monitoring: A Cooperative Receding Horizon Temporal Logic Control Approach

This paper deals with the problem of environmental monitoring by designing and analyzing a cooperative receding horizon temporal logic (CRH-TL) control approach for mobile robot networks. First, a radial basis function network is used to model the distribution of environmental attributes in the monitored environment. On the basis of the established environment model, the problem of environmental monitoring can be formulated as a dynamical optimization problem. Second, an acceptable node set is obtained by enforcing appropriate constraints from linear temporal logic (LTL) specifications on the task of environmental monitoring. Third, by designing a cooperative energy function and using the acceptable node set, the CRH-TL control approach is proposed to generate the movement trajectory of each robot, which satisfies the given LTL specifications while guiding mobile robot networks to trace the peaks of environmental attributes. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed CRH-TL control approach is illustrated for the problem of environmental monitoring.