Design and Evaluation of Robust Behavior-Based Controllers for Distributed Multi-Robot Collection Tasks

In this chapter, we demonstrate the e ectiveness of behavior-based control in facilitating the development and evaluation of multi-robot controllers that are: (1) robust to robot failures, and (2) easily modi ed to facilitate development of the controller variation that su ciently satis es the design requirements for the task. Our experimental focus here is distributed multi-robot collection, a class of tasks that includes de-mining and toxic waste clean-up. We demonstrate a basic, homogeneous multi-robot controller for the collection task, then show how to easily derive two heterogeneous, spatio-temporal variations with markedly di erent performance properties. We evaluate the desirability of these controllers with respect to design requirements involving inter-robot interference, time-to-completion, and energy expenditure. The data for evaluation come from experiments using four physical mobile robots performing the three variations of the collection task.

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