The Dilemma of Choice: Addressing Constraint Selection for Autonomous Robotic Agents

The tasks that an autonomous agent is expected to perform are often optional or are incompatible with each other owing to the agent's limited actuation capabilities, specifically the dynamics and control input bounds. We encode tasks as time-dependent state constraints and leverage the advances in multi-objective optimization to formulate the problem of choosing tasks as selection of a feasible subset of constraints that can be satisfied for all time and maximizes a performance metric. We show that this problem, although amenable to reachability or mixed integer model predictive control-based analysis in the offline phase, is NP-Hard in general and therefore requires heuristics to be solved efficiently. When incompatibility in constraints is observed under a given policy that imposes task constraints at each time step in an optimization problem, we assign a Lagrange score to each of these constraints based on the variation in the corresponding Lagrange multipliers over the compatible time horizon. These scores are then used to decide the order in which constraints are dropped in a greedy strategy. We further employ a genetic algorithm to improve upon the greedy strategy. We evaluate our method on a robot waypoint following task when the low-level controllers that impose state constraints are described by Control Barrier Function-based Quadratic Programs and provide a comparison with waypoint selection based on knowledge of backward reachable sets.