Multirobot Systems: A Classification Focused on Coordination

Abstract

Multirobot systems (MRS) are, nowadays, an important research area within robotics and artificial intelligence and a growing number of systems have recently been presented in the literature. Since application domains and tasks that are faced by MRS are of increasing complexity, the ability of the robots to cooperate can be regarded as a fundamental feature. In this paper, we present a survey of the recent work in the area by specifically examining the forms of cooperation and coordination realized in the MRS. In particular, we propose a new taxonomy for classification of the approaches to coordination in MRS and we describe some systems, which we consider representative in our taxonomy. We finally discuss the outcomes of our analysis and try to highlight future trends of the research on MRS.