To add with caution — decreasing a swarm robotics' efficiency by imprudently enhancing the robots' capabilities

摘要

This work discusses the common opinion among robotic systems' designers, speculating that given a robotic system designed for efficiently handling a given assignment, enhancing this system by increasing the physical capabilities of the robots may only result in an improvement in the overall performance of the system. Namely, a robotic systems designer may be allowed to freely use existing designs as a basis for new systems, by merely enhancing the robots' resources and capabilities, until finally the required performance will be achieved. This work argues that this assumption is incorrect and should be avoided, as it may result in systems comprised of advanced and expensive robots, which achieve far inferior performance than the original systems used as the basis of their designs. The work presents an example concerning the problem of multi-robots exploration of a graph, in which adding communication features to the robots causes the entire system's performance to drop significantly.