Security-Based Path Planning of Multi-Robot Systems by Partially Observed Petri Nets and Integer Linear Programming

This letter addresses the security-based path planning of multi-robot systems with Boolean specification tasks. Specifically, we consider the existence of an external intruder that is capable of partially monitoring the behavior of each robot. The security constraint requests that the intruder cannot infer whether the system has accessed the secret region based on the monitoring (constraint I), or the intruder cannot uniquely identify whether a specific robot has accessed the secret region (constraint II). In order to allocate the most energy-efficient pathway for every robot to fulfill the Boolean specification and security constraint, we utilize partially observed Petri nets to model the mobility capabilities of multi-robot systems and the observation of the intruder. Then, we provide an integer linear programming based solution that can generate optimal paths for the system. The validity of the proposed methodology is demonstrated through simulation studies.