Robust Behavior-Based Control for Distributed Multi-Robot Collection Tasks

Abstract : We demonstrate the effectiveness of behavior-based control in facilitating the development and evaluation of multi-robot controllers that are: (1) robust to robot failures, and(2) easily modified to facilitate development of the controller variation that sufficiently satisfies 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 multi-robot controller for the collection task, then show how to easily derive two spatio-temporal variations with markedly different 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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