Multi-Robot Cooperation

Abstract

Cooperative multi-robot systems have received a great deal of attention, motivated by technological advances in communication, computation, and sensing. A fundamental problem in cooperative multi-robot systems is designing a mechanism of cooperation between agents so that the overall performance of the system improves. In many cooperative control problems, robots move in a coordinated fashion to achieve some common goal and seek to maintain some geometrical relationships among themselves. An explicit motion planning approach produces a path or trajectory through the configuration space from an initial configuration to the goal configuration. Multi-robot applications include environmental monitoring, search and rescue, cooperative manipulation, collaborative mapping and exploration, battlefield assessment, and health monitoring of civil infrastructure. The research challenges encountered in cooperative multi-robot systems require the integration of different disciplines including control systems, artificial intelligence, biology, optimization, and robotics. Several researchers have extended potential field methods to make them suitable for multi-robot systems.