Reliability and Fault Tolerance in Collective Robot Systems

Abstract

Collective robotic systems (or, equivalently, multirobot teams) have many potential advantages over single-robot systems, includingincreased speed of task completion through parallelism; improvedsolutions for tasks that are inherently distributed in space, time,or functionality; cheaper solutions for complex applications thatcan be addressed with multiple specialized robots, rather than all-capablemonolithic entities; and increased robustness and reliabilitythrough redundancy [Parker (2008b)].