Comparing Three Approaches to Large-Scale Coordination

Coordination of large groups of agents or robots is starting to reach a level of maturity where prototype systems can be built and tested in realistic environments. These more realistic systems require that both algorithmic and practical issues are addressed in an integrated solution. In this chapter, we look at three implementations of large-scale coordination examining common issues, approaches, and open problems. The key result of the comparison is that there is a surprising degree of commonality between the independently developed approaches, in particular the use of partial, dynamic centralization. Conversely, open issues and problems encountered varied greatly with the notable exception that debugging was a major issue for each approach.