Navigation in Large Groups of Robots

As robots become more ubiquitous, research in large-scale robot navigation has gained more focus given their potential real-world applications. This review intends to provide a summary of recent advances on the field of multi-robot navigation, focusing on cases where scale is an important attribute of the system. Experimental evaluation of a large number of robots is complex due to size and cost constraints. Successful applications of large-scale robot navigation approaches are in structured and known environments where robots are centrally controlled. Advances in the standardization of robot hardware and software are increasing interest for research in navigation for large groups of robots. We present a review on navigation approaches for multi-robot systems. Then, we focus on recent articles that deal with the problem of moving a large number of robots in virtual or physical space. Finally, we summarize our main findings and emphasize the challenges.

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